Google Prepping A Second Life Competitor?

Rumors of a Google powered virtual world based on Google Earth surfaced in January; today there is word that Google may be testing their virtual world at Arizona State University (ASU).

According to Google Operating System, ASU students have the opportunity to test a new product “that will be publicly launched later this year” by “a major Internet company” that is related to social networking, 3D modeling and video games. The questionnaire attached to the application process asks would be testers if they have a Gmail account, and if not would they be willing to get one. The product’s name is shown as “My World.”

Google’s Sketchup service already provides the tech to do 3D modeling and could also be used to create avatars.

We know for certain now that Google has big plans for social networking, from SocialStream to Google’s planned November 5 launch of the mother of all open social networking platforms. Whether the planned service will be a true Second Life competitor is still to be seen, however I suspect that if Google is prepping a virtual world it will be closer to IBM’s Virtual World chat platform than Second Life. To deliver a full UGC world is a not an easy step where a basic 3D world which builds on Google Earth, SketchUp, and existing Google social networking platforms including Orkut would seem more likely.
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Yuuguu Takes Desktop Sharing Mobile

UK based Yuuguu will officially launch at DEMO today with a cross platform desktop sharing platform that also works on mobile phones.

Yuuguu, a name apparently derived from the Japanese word for fusion, enables users to see, share, and control other computer screens and applications. Yuuguu supports web browsers on any device, notably on mobile phones providing anywhere access and flexibility.

Suggested uses include team members working on a project or by friends sharing applications.

Yuuguu also includes low cost voice conferencing services for one-to-one and one-to-many voice calls.

This is a close to saturated vertical, and I’m tempted to say that a startup entering the space must have rocks in their head, or something completely different. Mobile desktop sharing is fairly new, however I couldn’t get it to work. Issues aside, Yuuguu’s idea is sound, with a lot of potential.

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Microsoft May Invest in Facebook At $10 Billion Valuation

Microsoft May Invest in Facebook At $10 Billion Valuation

Friendster Plays To Strengths, Launches In Chinese

Friendster is back, at least in Asia.

The social network that was the coolest thing on the block until MySpace came around has been slowly regaining its reputation and users over the years, and now boasts 50 million registered user and 27.4 million monthly unique visitors. The only problem (if you call it a problem) is that, like Orkut, most of those users are outside of the U.S. Specifically, they’re in the Asia/Pacific region - 24 million of the total 27.4 million unique monthly visitors come from there, as do 35 million of the 50 million registered users.

So it’s no surprise that the social network is playing to its strengths and launching its first non-English version, in traditional Chinese. This isn’t a separate website or URL; users simply click to Chinese to have the content localized to that language. User generated stuff remains in the original language.

France Telecom’s Orange to adopt OpenID

Yesterday at the Digital ID conference in San Francisco, Orange, one of the major mobile operator and ISP with more than 40 million subscribers announced they would adopt the OpenID registration/identification standard. There was already a clear trend from big internet properties to adopt (Digg, Technorati Microsoft and AOL but also Yahoo and WikiPedia already announced that).

But this is the first time that a major TelCo is taking that step. There is already an implementation of OpenID on the French portal available at openid.orange.fr . Orange presents also on the page a list of OpenID providers.

This is a good news for OpenID standard. The question remaining concerns the pace of adoption by the users. I could not find the access to the openID page by navigating from the homepage of the portal. It will probably pushed at later stage after the first tests. I also found the explanation not simple enough to understand for a new user (most of them are not early adopters) and Orange should probably think about a a short visual/demo to explain simply the benefits of such a service. An international roll out will probably come out soon.