Vipul’s blog

In a bid to have more users to try out and use Zoho applications, users are now given the options to login using their Google or Yahoo accounts. Below the usual Sign In section, users can see the options to login using Google or Yahoo accounts.

You will be logged in to Zoho automatically if you already have a Zoho account with Google or Yahoo email address or else you have the option to associate the Google or Yahoo email address with your existing Zoho account. In addition to this, you also have the option to import contacts from these accounts to your Zoho account.

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Facebook has announced on its developer blog that it’s building a Jabber/XMPP interface for Facebook Chat, in its efforts to add new features to enhance the Chat experience. So, in the near future, Facebook users can expect to use Jabber/XMPP-based chat applications to connect to Facebook Chat.

This new feature will also enable Facebook users with such desktop clients to communicate with their friends, see which of their friends are online, view friends’ profile pictures, and set their status messages. This will all be possible after users authorize their applications to securely connect and communicate with Facebook Chat.

Facebook’s 23 years old Chief Technology Officer Adam D’Angelo is leaving the company to take some time off according to Facebook and the social-networking site has reportedly confirmed the departure.

According to sources, D’Angelo felt the position no longer fit well with his skills and interests. There have also been rumors of tension between D’Angelo and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who have known to each other since high school.

Given the exodus of numerous Google employees to Facebook and Google & Yahoo responding to Facebook’s popularity with their own social connection offerings, one can just wonder if D’Angelo will be seen in Sunnyvale or Mountain View by the end of the summer, or perhaps a top Googler or Yahoo heading over to Facebook to fill their new VP of Engineering position?

The move comes as Facebook has reportedly borrowed $100 million to finance the expansion of its server farms, and other infrastructure expenses.

In line with Facebook and MySpace, Google is also expected to join the social network data portability with Friend Connect. As per TechCrunch Friend Connect “will be a set of APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites”.

MySpace and Facebook are ahead in network data portability with Data Availability and Facebook Connent (sounding similar to Google’s Friend Connect) respectively.

These social network data portability initiatives provide a way to users to manage their friends, profile photos, events, and other data across the Web to partner sites. MySpace has partnered with Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter for it’s Data Availability project.

Yahoo is partnering with the leading social networks so its users can take advantage of the freeing of user data, and it will also be crafting its own social network and APIs as part of its forthcoming Yahoo Open Strategy.

TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington says:

“The reason these companies are are rushing to get products out the door is because whoever is a player in this space is likely to control user data over the long run. If users don’t have to put profile and friend information into multiple sites, they will gravitate towards one site that they identify with, and then allow other sites to access that data. The desire to own user identities over the long run is also causing the big Internet companies, in my opinion, to rush to become OpenID issuers (but not relying parties).

If what we hear is correct, Google’s offering may not be as attractive as MySpace’s and Facebook’s. Google may be keeping a tighter reign on data, requiring third parties to show it directly from Google’s servers in an iframe. By contract, MySpace and Facebook are sending data via an API and trusting third parties not to abuse it (with strict terms of service in case they violate that trust). That flexibility also allows those third parties to do more with the data, including combining it with their own data before displaying it.”

The key chanllenge for all these efforts is to main user privacy and security. There has already been lot of noise about privacy specially when Facebook earlier opened itself for developers. I hope everybody is aware of this and these sites will be extra careful in this regard. Lets see how this initiative shapes up in coming time.

Google is working on displaying advertisements on YouTube and users can expect it to happen over the next few months. So, YouTube users will soon see advertisements around their online videos.

“We have new ad products that are not pre-roll and post-roll,” Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said, referring to ads that show up before and after videos. “We have new approaches. Think of them as ads that are in the context of YouTube. They use the page around YouTube in interesting ways.”

For what it’s worth, Google last year experimented with overlay ads that pop up within the YouTube video player itself for a few seconds. They didn’t go over too well with some viewers.

Google, which bought YouTube in October 2006 for $1.65 billion in stock, makes the vast majority of its money from text ads that show up next to search results, but in particular through its acquisition of DoubleClick, it’s working to improve its business in display ads.