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Google buys Pyra Labs
Argyle writes "SiliconValley.com reports that Google has bought Pyra Labs. Pyra Labs is the creator of the Blogger software and runs the blogger.com and blogspot.com services. In weblog fashion, founder Evan Williams reported the news on his weblog in the middle of the Live from the Blogosphere event."
On slashdot.org, there will roughly 100 posts per day claiming that Google is "the evil empire." It's a rule. Commercial success and non-Open-Source-itude (I'm allowed to make up words here.) are considered evil on the /. boards. So before you guys go all crazy about how Google's assimilating every company are being evil and all (and undoubtedly citing the Scientology debacle, no less), just remember this: ultimately, the quality of the product matters.
I think Google is the perfect Pyra buyer because their user-driven mentality is right in line with Evan's mentality. Google Labs is full of cool ideas that three-person Google teams come up with, and the ones that get a lot of user attention and use get funded further and get ramped up for mainstream use. It makes perfect sense to me that Google would be attracted to the best extra-googliar example of this mentality: Blogger, the first large-scale hosted blog application.
Curiosities I have are how Google will deal with it's first for-pay service, and what, if any, value-adds Google will give to Blogger blogs: Higher rankings in search results? Possibly. Live posting into Google's search index? Probably. I'm sure there are ideas that haven't even been thought of yet.
I can't wait to see where this goes! I just wish I was a part of it.
Kevin Fox
It is not a big news actually, as people wanted it to be. Searching and Blogging are different things. Webblogging will reach its limits soon, since not everyone is eager to put something out there. It is a personal choice, and blogging, although still with growth potential, will not become the next big thing. Google's decision is in some way a very good decision, since we need a tool to search blogs, separately, just like Google News. Google is right again on the issue. Blogging will be important.
Yeah... except for groups.google.com - copy of dejanews.com which actually had a nicer interface.
Oh, and froogle.google.com... weak attempt at pricegrabber.com, mysimon.com etc.
Google has great search (powered by basically one incredible idea - pagerank) but the services they have branched out with have been lackluster at best.
This isn't about Google pumping up Blogger, or BlogSpot. This is about them acquiring direct access to blog data.
--
Jordan
Not necessarily.
When Google bought out DejaNews (as the article point out), they made a section entitled Google Groups, separate from the main site.
You don't see newsgroup posts on your usual searches, do you?
And all the trends they can presumedly spot and all the private emails they can nab as part of all the drivel...I mean data. Gotta be painful having to wade thru all that whining. This isn't fb. My point is to agree with the parent that the back end is the driver.
Anyone thinking this is so google can be a better neighbor isn't paying attention.
Your blogs belong to google. Hand 'em over.
Not to sound as though I were attacking your post, but this kind of thinking strangely reminds me of the pro-linux-open-source-zealotry that runs rampant around here. We don't have any idea whatsoever what they intend to do with this, and yet it is beyond reproach?
I'm going to make a guess... that this will be a horrible waste of money.
"Google good, four-legs baaad."
We can neither love nor pity nor forgive. If you make a slip in handling us you die!
I already use livejournal, but I could see blogging at google considering 80% of the time I am going to google.com and then looking up other stuff.
If you are going to be at google to look up other site, pictures, catalogs, etc. might as well get your daily blogging needs taken care of as well.
Moderators, this is NOT funny, it's insightful. There's nothing worse than doing a websearch for a serious topic and ending up with 50 hits, none of which are an informed source on the topic, and all of which are repeating some kind of rumor or random musing on the subject. Not to say that some blog-writers aren't informed, but the vast majority are not, and it's terribly frustrating to have to wade through countless pages of rambling and ranting to Get To The Point.
That said, i doubt Google will push blog hits in its results. A more likely result is a blog-specific search, or a way of networking together the resources that blogs link to. For example, Google's current algorithm seems to select sites based on "popularity" (number of links from other pages to that site)... blogs do this too, but in a social rather than statistical manner - certain "cool sites" become popular and blog-writers spam them around to other blog-writers and soon a whole bunch of blogs point to the same link - but only for a short time. Google might be able to lever this effect to produce date-ordered results related to a specific issue.
I got a sig so you would remember me.
a. Google News
Dan Gillmor, who broke this story, mentioned in an update the possibility, that the weblog links can be used to improve Google News.
But Google doesn't need to buy Pyra for that. Google can spider any leading weblog they want. Yes, there was this problem of interlinked weblogs resulting in a high PR (PageRank) for certain logs, but Google fixed that problem by giving more value to outgoing links then incoming links. They don't need to buy Blogger for indexing of weblogs.
b. Portal
Another suggestion that has been made: Google is moving to a portal.
I refuse to believe that Google is getting megalomanic. Besides, we all know what happened to AltaVista.
c. Direct access
Jshare suggested Google bought Blogger to get direct access to blog data.
But crawling the 200.000 active Blogs doesn't cost much resources. It's only a few gig of data. Why bother to buy a whole firm for that?
d. Journal with ads
Mateub suggests that Google could make a magazine out of the blogs, complete with ads.
But they can do that already. Have a close look at news.google.com. Search for, hmm, Google At the right side, there's enough space for ads. Google could index just the weblogs, like Daypop, and make a new product out of it (without buying Pyra).
Whatever the reason is behind the buy, it will have a huge impact. The simple fact that one of the hottest internet companies buys Pyra's Blogger will make the product main stream in months.
Henk van Ess editor of Voelspriet
TIP: Check Ovidiu Predescu site now and then. He started working at Google's on January 22 and writes about it in his ...weblog.
So why do it in the first place? The whole point of publishing something online is in the hope that someone out there will read it (for whatever reason). If it truely was "just for yourself" you would be writing it in a pen-and-paper journal, or in a personal document you never uploaded. Of course blog-writers want people to read their stuff. Unfortunately most of it is garbage.
There is no irony in the grand-parent's comment because it's a comment in a community. When blogs became popular people started calling Slashdot a "web log", but really it's always been a discussion forum, just like usenet but on the web. Blogs on the other hand are about a single person making some commentary about this subject or that. It's about the ego of the poster, whereas Slashdot and similar discussion sites are about the combined thoughts of all of the posters.
I got a sig so you would remember me.
To a certain extent, nothing is written anywhere that is not wanted by the author to be read. Even if that want is very small at the back of the author's mind.
Most diaries are not written not by the author to the author, but by the author to some variable entity. Sometimes that entity is a lost parent. Sometimes it's a soulmate they've yet to meet. Sometimes it's just an invisible friend named "diary."
A weblog does about the same thing with little additional effort. Author sits, opens blogging interface, writes. The only major difference is the type of physical motion involved. The difference between a diary writer and a columnist is the same as that between a personal blogger and a more ambitious one. A personal blogger writes about all the little shit and joys of his daily life, and at most invites his close friends and family in to share himself. An ambitious blogger will cover those little shits and joys only so far as they tie into some kind of bigger issue they think people will find important.
That, however, is painting both types of bloggers in a very dim light. Truly, the blog is the greatest democratizer created to date. Anyone can pick up their own personal megaphone, and shout out to the masses, in a town square without physical limits. They don't even have to have anything to say. Plus, you aren't forced to listen if you don't want to. You just go to one of the large parts of the square that the megaphone doesn't reach. Democratic all around.
The post that spurred all this discussion could be called flamebait... but ironic is more fun. "Free clue: No one gives a damn about you, or your thoughts." It being a comment in a community or out of one doesn't matter- either way it's still an expression of his thoughts. Ironic indeed.
Thought provoking, however, sounds like a better mod point to use.
*honk*
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
Not only could you search the Internet, but you could refine your searches just to other people's thoughts, etc.
Sweet screaming monkeys would that be pointless. Blogs are like dreams; they're only interesting to the people they belong to. If by some freakish twist of fate I cared about your last trip to Reno or what kind of sandwich you ate last week, I'd ask you.
Ah ha! Finally, a solution for the Google Time Bomb! Google would be able to filter out 85% of the blogs and show us the real (read: unblogged) results.
$DEITY bless $NATION