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Zoho on Thursday announced the availability of Zoho Docs, which will help Zoho users manage their documents centrally so they won’t need to skip from Writer, Sheet, and Show to get work done.

Zoho Docs is a bit overdue, but it’s good to see the company finally moving towards improving an offering that’s still a bit all over the place.

According to Zoho, its new Docs application will allow users to upload any file type they wish with a ZIP upload process. The new software will also give users the ability to view documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in a tab within the application via view mode. If they want to edit the document, they can open it with a particular Zoho app in a separate window.

Taking a page out of the Google Docs playbook, Zoho Docs now also offers group sharing, which, as you might expect, will let specific groups have access to, and edit, documents. And while working in Zoho Docs, the company has added a chat function, which will let you correspond with people in those groups as you work.

The new and improved Zoho Docs seems like a logical next step for the company. Finally, Zoho will offer many of the functions already found in Google Docs and won’t frustrate its users by requiring them to move back and forth between applications without a central location to work out from.

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What nine of the world's largest websites are running on - tecnologías web 2.0 que usan los grandes sitios

If more people are searching on Google for “Obama” than “McCain” does that mean he is more likely to win the election?

Not every voter in the U.S. uses Google, or even uses the Internet, for that matter. But enough of the population does use Google that its search patterns cannot be ignored by either candidate, the press, or anyone interested in the outcome of the election. Fortunately, Google lets anyone see the relative popularity of different search terms on Google Trends. The screen shot above is from a comparison I just did between “Obama” and “McCain” in the U.S. over the past 12 months. If search volume is predictive of election results and the elections were held today, Obama would win.

More traditional polls come to the same conclusion. A CNN-Opinion Research Corp. poll conducted June 4 and 5, shows Obama ahead by 47 percent to McCain’s 43 percent (Ralph Nader has 6 percent). And a Gallup poll shows a tighter race, with Obama at 46 percent verses McCain at 45 percent. Obviously, it is a close race and sentiment can go either way between now and November. And there is a likely correlation between search volume and news mentions, which are also compared in the graph above (by pulling in data from Google News).

What is great about Google Trends, though, is that you can drill down by state. An in-depth analysis of how predictive Google Trends was during the primaries (by Michael Giuffrida, a student in Virginia) shows that in at least half the cases for the Democratic primaries, Google Trends did a good job predicting the outcome. Update: Just to clarify, the analysis looks at both Democratic and Republican primaries. For the Democratic primaries 37 states were analyzed, and five of those had to be thrown out because of insufficient data. Of the remaining 32, Google Trends correctly predicted 27 of the primary elections, or an 84 percent success rate. For the Republican primaries, 29 elections were analyzed and Google Trends correctly predicted only about half (the data wasn’t as good for a variety of reasons).

Below are two of his comparisons of Google Trends and actual election results in Missouri (where Obama won) and Florida Nevada (where Clinton won). Google Trends appears to be more predictive the higher the search volume (i.e., the more data points). Some states had more searching than others, but you’d expect election-related searches to spike across the board as the general election nears. At the very least, both campaigns would be wise to use it as a sanity check on their own polling on a state-by-state basis, if they are not doing so already.

(via Slashdot).

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Google has long used its personalized homepage, iGoogle, as a launching point for its foray into social-networking applications. Any developer who builds an OpenSocial app, for instance, can make it work as a widget (er, gadget) on iGoogle. So far, it’s been more of a personal home page. But now iGoogle is taking another step towards becoming a full-fledged social network in its own right.

It is a tiny step, but could be indicative of the direction iGoogle is going to take. Google has opened up a sandbox for developers where they can try building some new types of iGoogle apps not available to the general iGoogle user population. Most significantly, they can add activity streams (i.e., updates) and friends lists in new navigation panes on the page. Any change in a third-party iGoogle widget will be able to be reflected in the updates pane. (This has actually been a long time coming, since adding activity streams was always part of the OpenSocial plan). And they can also play around with larger “canvas” pages that users can click through to from each widget for a full-page experience. How very Facebook of them.

Again, Google is only making these features available to developers to see what they come up with, and is not yet announcing their roll-out to the “general population.” But you can see the writing on the wall.

Here’s more info on the iGoogle APIs. And here’s a video explaining some of the new features.

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Last night, Microsoft pushed out a ton of new features to Windows Live Maps, including a face-lift to some of its 3-D cities (Las Vegas, Dallas, Denver and Phoenix), the ability to export your collections to GPS devices and GeoRSS feeds (which means I can make custom maps for my Dash GPS), support for 3D-map video tours, better directions and traffic information, and also one-click directions that change the route on a map based on what direction you are coming from.

But there was one feature that really caught my eye. You can now import KML files into Live Maps. KML stands for Keyhole Markup Language, and it was invented by Keyhole, the acquired startup behind Google Earth that is now part of Google. KML has become a standard for describing maps hosted on the Web.

What this means, though, is that Live Maps can now drink Google’s milkshake. Because all the customized maps that people have made and share on Google Maps can be grabbed as a KML file. So now Microsoft can benefit from all that work done by Google Map users by simply slurping all of those maps into Live Maps.

For instance, here is a Google map created by a user named Matthew B. titled PA & NJ Winter Camping that shows camping sites in those states:

Now, here is the same map sucked into Windows Live Maps. It is the exact same information with the same pushpins and descriptions layered into Live Maps:.

Of course, this is a two-way street, since any customized map on Live Maps or in Microsoft’s Virtual Earth can now also be exported as a KML file. Google can take out its straw and slurp right back from the Live Maps glass. The difference is that Google’s glass is a lot more full and is more yummy because so many more people have created customized Google Maps than customized Live Maps.

So right about now, Microsoft is wielding an old wooden bowling pin, wiping its chin, and ranting, “I drink it up!”

(Milkshake photo by Dion Gillard).

And here is a picture of an enhanced 3D Las Vegas:

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Today more than ever, the Web is a global game. Below are charts from a new State of the Internet report from comScore that paints a picture of global competition on the Web.

In 1996, two thirds of all people online (66 percent) lived in the U.S. By last October, that had completely flipped, with 77 percent of the online population living in the rest of the world and only 23 percent in the U.S. The U.S. still has the largest total number of Web surfers (162 million a month), but China is catching up fast (with 96 million):

In China, homegrown sites such as TenCent, Baidu and Sina all reach more native Web surfers than Microsoft, Google, or Yahoo:

In fact, the leading Websites in many big markets such as Russia, Japan, and South Korea tend to be homegrown as well:

Social networks are the fastest-growing category of sites (nearly 60 percent annually), but they still lag in terms of penetration (less than 40 percent) behind photo sites, entertainment sites, search, and portals:

The fastest growing of all social networks, of course, has been Facebook, which jumped from the second pack to where it is now running neck-and-neck with MySpace:

Drilling down into search, Google still dominates with 62 percent share worldwide:

And it dominates search even more in other countries than it does in the U.S., where it only commands a 53 percent market share (compared to above 90 percent in parts of Europe and Latin America):

Looking at the efficiency of its search ads, Google puts up an ad against only about half of its searches, whereas Yahoo puts up an ad 75 percent of the time. Yet for those searches where an ad is shown, Google gets 0.24 paid click per search compared to 0.18 for Yahoo and 0.14 for Microsoft. (Search advertising on AOL and Ask are also powered by Google and they show the same or better clickthrough rates).

For display ads, Yahoo and MySpace control the most market share, with 19 and 15 percent each, respectively. (Microsoft comes in a distant third with 6.6 percent):

The report also gives an estimate of the unduplicated reach of Microsoft and Yahoo. A combined Microsoft-Yahoo would have 173 million unique visitors a month across the globe, a 10 percent share of all page views, 32 percent share of search, and 24 percent share of display ads:

Both Microsoft and Yahoo each have about 260 million Webmail users (with duplication), with Google’s Gmail bringing up third place with 87 million (no wonder Google execs keep bringing up market concentration concerns in relation to mail and instant messaging):

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Click Forensics has some data out on click fraud (clicks on Internet ads that are not real) in the fourth quarter of 2007 and for the full year. The industry-wide average click fraud rate for the entire year went up 15 percent, ending the year with 16.6 percent of all clicks on Web ads being fraudulent. The click fraud rate for search engine ad networks alone, including Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network, grew even more. That was up 47 percent in the fourth quarter, ending the year with a 28.3 percent click fraud rate. According to this data, nearly one out of every three clicks on a Google or Yahoo ad is fraudulent.

While the year-over-year growth is cause for concern, the click fraud rates remained pretty steady compared to the third quarter of 2007, when the overall click fraud rate was 16.2 percent and the search-engine click fraud rate was 28.1 percent (see charts above). One quarter does not make a trend, but could the click fraud rate be leveling off? One can hope. If Google can ever get that rate to actually go down, maybe its stock will shoot up again.

Click Forensics also published the handy heat map below showing the countries where the most click fraud is originating. (Red is bad, green is benign). The biggest sources of click fraud are India (4.3 percent), Germany (3.9 percent), and South Korea (3.7 percent). Mexico is also in the red.

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If there is one thing I noticed this past year, it is that companies seem to be tripping over themselves more than ever before to claim the mantle of openness. Openness is now a marketing mantra. Facebook kicked things off in May by opening up its social network to outside developers through a comprehensive set of APIs. Google responded by trying to “out open” Facebook with the launch of its own platform for social networking apps, OpenSocial (which was more open than Facebook’s APIs, but still not open enough for some people). Google also introduced its open-source mobile operating system, Android, which prompted even old-school, closed-network mobile carriers like Verizon and AT&T to play the open card. And in the face of the success of open-source blogging software Wordpress, Six Apart finally made its rival Moveable Type open source as well. These are just a few examples.

Building a product or service on top of open standards is held as one of the highest virtues in technology. It is certainly one of the easiest ways for a company to score points with consumers, developers, or other companies. And for good reason. The Internet, after all, is built on open standards. Open-source technologies such as Linux, Apache, MySQL, and others have lowered the cost to start a Web company.

More importantly, open standards (whether or not they are technically open-source) are inherently more attractive to work with for startups and other companies. The best way to build a technology platform is to make it as open as possible so that the risk of proprietary lock-in is taken off the table for other contributors.  Also, compatibility can be baked right in. On the Web, everything needs to be compatible, which is one of the main drivers behind the widespread adoption of open standards. It is no coincidence that we are beginning to see a bigger push for openness in mobile networks as we start to use our phones more and more as Web devices.

But don’t be fooled. Companies are very selective about the areas where they choose to be open, and they very rarely open up their core source of profits voluntarily. For all the fascination with the iPhone, for instance, one of the big knocks against Apple is that it is taking its traditional closed, controlling approach when it comes to opening up the device to outside applications. (Although, the company has promised to open up the iPhone to developers soon). And when Amazon copied Apple’s iPod business model with its closed Kindle Reader (it is the only e-reader that can download digital books from Amazon), there were similar calls on Amazon to open up the device.

Just because industry pressures and increased interconnectedness are forcing companies to embrace open technologies, don’t confuse openness with profitability. Open standards tend to be good for spurring the adoption of new technologies, but not so good for generating profits directly. That is why companies choose to be open along axes where they don’t compete. Google, for instance, is a big proponent of open standards in social networking, mobile networks, Web applications, and practically everywhere —except the one place it makes money. Its advertising system is a black box. You also never hear any talk coming out of Google about opening up the search algorithms that drive all of those advertising revenues. In contrast, Google has no problem championing open standards in industries that it is hoping to disrupt (by commoditizing existing business models with open standards, and making money with advertising instead).

It is no surprise that, in general, startups tend to like openness more than larger, more established companies. Open standards lower barriers to entry and make it easier for multiple industry players to participate (and cooperate) in the same market. Bigger companies with more to lose tend to resist openness. Apple is being extra careful about how it opens up the iPhone precisely because it doesn’t want random third-party applications to ruin the consumer experience it has worked so hard to perfect by crashing the iPhone. The reason the iPhone is so successful is arguably because of Apple’s insistence that it control every aspect of how it works. Openness and control, though, don’t really go together.
I don’t mean to suggest that big companies cannot learn how to ride the momentum that openness creates. IBM is a great example here, championing Linux and other open-source technologies in markets where it does not compete or dominate (operating systems) in furtherance of businesses where it does compete that are built on top of those open technologies (enterprise software and IT consulting). Again, the point is that companies need to pick and choose.

Take Amazon and the Kindle. Amazon has more to gain from opening up the Kindle than Apple does from opening up the iPhone. Unlike Apple, which makes money from selling the device itself, Amazon makes money from the digital book store that comes with its device. (This is the exact opposite of Apple, which makes barely no money from its equivalent iTunes store). The appeal of the Kindle is the service behind it, not the $300 device itself (which is probably subsidized). Also unlike Apple, Amazon is not very good at industrial design. If it were to create an open-source reference design for the Kindle Reader, another company could make one that is less clunky. More electronic readers would be sold, and more digital books would be purchased from Amazon.

So the next time a company touts how open it is, ask yourself how that will help it make more money. Don’t confuse openness with altruism.

(Image via j/f/photos).

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Is OpenSocial open enough? The problem with OpenSocial, Google’s new platform for social-networking apps, notes Tim O’Reilly, is that it doesn’t go quite far enough. It lets applications out from the confines of any one Website, but it does not let the data out. Apparently, you cannot mix and match data from more than one app to create a new social app. This is wrongheaded, argues O’Reilly:

It’s the data, stupid.

We don’t want to have the same application on multiple social networks. We want applications that can use data from multiple social networks.

That is an important point. You cannot have a proper mashup without complete data portability. Programmers would prefer to have access to the underlying data powering these social apps so that they can create their own new social mashups. Such new social apps would also benefit consumers who would have more social apps to choose from, and broaden the market overall.

Unfortunately, the business models have not been worked out yet to accommodate such mixing of data. If a social mashup starts making money from ads, how would that be split up between the host site, the app developer, and all the other applications or social networks from which that mashup pulls data? O’Reilly doesn’t really have an answer for that one.

Under the OpenSocial rules, it is the host sites who make the rules. The more players involved in any given app, the more complicated the economics—unless they take the Facebook approach that data can move everywhere, but you only make money on the pages you control.

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