Google STRUGGLES to build Social Features like FACEBOOK

Google has been stunningly adept at devising computer algorithms to help people search the Internet. But when it comes to building features for social networking, the company has been much less effective.

Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press

Vic Gundotra, a Google vice president, is responsible for mobile applications

Google depends on having its finger on the pulse of the entire Internet, and maintaining its status as the primary entree to the Web. But as people spend more time on closed social networks like Facebook, where much of the data they share is off limits to search engines, Google risks losing the competition for Web users’ time, details of their lives and, ultimately, advertising.

“Google’s made a lot of money helping people make decisions using search engines, but more and more people are turning to social outlets to make decisions,” said Charlene Li, founder of Altimeter Group, a technology research and advisory firm. “And whenever people make decisions, there’s money involved.”

Google has been trying to create social components, most recently with Buzz, a service that gives Gmail users the ability to share status updates, photos and videos. But that, and earlier efforts, have not been hugely popular.

Now the company will try again, with tools to be unveiled this fall, said Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive. Although the details remain murky, Mr. Schmidt and other Google officials sketched a broad outline of their plans in recent interviews.

Some of the tools are still being developed, they said; others will add features to existing products, like search, e-mail, maps, photos, video and ads.

The company plans to “take Google’s core products and add a social component, to make the core products even better,” Mr. Schmidt said.

But some wonder whether Google understands enough about social connections to create the tools people want to use.

“Google’s culture is very much based on the power of the algorithm, and it’s very difficult to algorithm social interaction,” Ms. Li said.

For example, the introduction of Buzz in February caused a wave of criticism from privacy advocates and everyday users, because it automatically included users’ e-mail contacts in their Buzz network. Google quickly changed the service so that it suggested friends instead of automatically connecting them.

Before Buzz’s release to the public, it was tested only by Google employees.

“There is some belief at Google that their DNA is not perfectly suited to build social products, and it’s a quite controversial topic internally,” said a person who has worked on Google’s social products who would speak only on the condition of anonymity.

“The part of social that’s about stalking people, sharing photos, looking cool — it’s mentally foreign to engineers,” the person said. “All those little details are subtle and sometimes missed, especially by technical people who are brought up in a very utilitarian company.”

Google has a social network, Orkut, but that never took off in the United States, although it is popular in Brazil and India. There are also Google profiles, which let people link Google to LinkedIn and Twitter, for example, so that information their friends have published online can appear in search results. Only a small percentage of Google users have created these profiles.

And as Facebook gains in popularity, it grows as a threat. Google sites, including the search engine and YouTube, get more unique visitors than Facebook. But in August, for the first time, people spent more time on Facebook than on Google sites, according to comScore, the Web analytics firm.

Some people are beginning to turn to their friends on Facebook for information for which they had used Google, like asking for recommendations on the best sushi or baby sitter.

Through a new partnership with Microsoft, an investor in Facebook, the things your friends like on Facebook can show up in the search results from Bing, Microsoft’s search engine.

The threat goes straight to the bottom line, too. Facebook is increasing its sales of display ads with images, which Google is counting on as its next big business.

Google has assembled a team of engineers to work on social networking, led by two executives who worked on Buzz — Vic Gundotra, vice president for engineering responsible for mobile applications, and Bradley Horowitz, a vice president for product management overseeing Google Apps.

“Google, as part of our mission to organize the world’s information, also needs to organize and make it very useful for you to see the interactions of your friends, to participate with them and benefit,” Mr. Gundotra said.

Resource from: http://www.nytimes.com

Racist : Many Questions on Killing of Pace Student by Police

An image of Danroy Henry Jr. from the Pace University football Web site.

It was the homecoming game, and a reunion of sorts for two childhood friends on the opposing teams. Danroy Henry Jr. was a junior defensive back for the home team, Pace University, in Pleasantville, N.Y. Everyone called him D.J.

Erik Jacobs for The New York Times

Brandon Cox and his mother, Donna, in South Easton, Mass.

Brandon Cox was a running back for the visitors, Stonehill College of Easton, Mass. The two 20-year-olds had been teammates at Oliver Ames High School in North Easton, where their coach called them inseparable. And though Stonehill drubbed Pace on Saturday, 27-0, that was no reason not to get together for some postgame fun at a Westchester County restaurant near campus.

Within hours, Mr. Henry lay fatally wounded in the front seat of a car riddled by police bullets, and Mr. Cox was injured, in a shooting that has mystified people who were close to the young men.

“They were just a joy to be around, never in any trouble,” said Jim Artz, their high school coach. “If my sons grew up to be like these two, I would have been very happy.”

The State Police and the Westchester County district attorney’s office said on Monday that they would join the investigation into the shooting, which involved Pleasantville and Mount Pleasant police officers.

According to the Mount Pleasant police, officers were trying to subdue an unruly crowd around 1 a.m. Sunday in a parking lot outside Finnegan’s Grill, a popular student hangout in Thornwood, about two miles from the Pace campus and about 33 miles north of New York City.

One of the officers approached a car that was parked in the fire lane, where Mr. Henry sat in the driver’s seat. Mr. Cox was in the passenger seat, and a third football player, Desmond Hinds, a senior wide receiver at Pace, was in the back.

When the officer knocked on the window, Mr. Henry tried to speed away, striking one officer and pinning another against the hood, the police said. The officer clinging to the hood then pulled out his gun and fired into the car. Another officer also fired into the car, which crashed into a parked police car and came to a stop.

At an impromptu news conference outside their upper-middle-class home in South Easton, about 30 miles south of Boston, Mr. Cox’s family gave a starkly different version of the shooting.

“They thought the police were asking them to move out of the fire lane,” Thomas Parks, Mr. Cox’s stepfather, said. “The next thing you know there’s a police officer jumping from behind a car and he starts shooting.”

Mr. Cox, who was grazed in the shoulder and wore a hooded sweat shirt covering the bandages as he joined Mr. Parks, said he was “devastated” by the loss of his friend, but did not discuss the shooting in detail.

“We did not do anything to deserve this,” he said. “In my mind, what went on, there was no need for any of that.”

The officer who fired from the hood was identified as Aaron Hess, a former New York City police officer who has been with the Pleasantville police since 2003. The other officer who fired was identified as Ronald Beckley, a 30-year veteran of the Mount Pleasant police. Both were in uniform at the time, the police said. It was unclear on Monday how many shots were fired at the car and how many bullets struck Mr. Henry.

No one has been charged in the case. The officers, who suffered minor injuries, have been placed on administrative duties.

Janet DiFiore, the Westchester district attorney, said the investigation would be “detailed, thorough and complete,” and would include many witness interviews and a review of video surveillance.

Mr. Henry’s parents, who had traveled from Massachusetts along with Mr. Cox’s parents to watch the game on Saturday, did not return calls seeking comment on Monday. The families had met for pizza before the game.

A message on the Henrys’ voice mail on Monday said the family needed some time alone and asked supporters to “tell every single person how much influence Danroy had on you, or the good person he was, and just let everybody know he’s not the kind of person they’re going to try to make him out to be.”

At Mount Pleasant police headquarters, Police Chief Louis Alagno had a pained expression as he greeted visitors on Monday. On his office wall was a classic Norman Rockwell print of an officer at a counter talking with a little boy. The picture could have been ripped from a scene out of Mount Pleasant, where, the chief said he believed, no officer had fired a weapon in the line of duty since the early 1980s.

“This is devastating,” Chief Alagno said. “Just about every officer that was on the scene is truly devastated.”

The chief said he met with Mr. Henry’s father, mother and two younger siblings on Sunday. “They are a beautiful family,” he said. Mr. Henry’s father, he said, “was much more composed than I would have been under the circumstances.”

Resource from: http://www.nytimes.com

In Sumo's Push for the Olympics, a Turn Away From Tradition

Yoshikazu Tsuno/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

OSAKA, JAPAN — For years, promoters of sumo have been pushing for the sport’s inclusion in the Olympic Games.

The sumo wrestler Miki Satoyama, right, threw her opponent during the heavyweight class of the Japan women’s sumo championships in Sakai city, in southern Osaka on Oct. 3


To get there, the International Sumo Federation has thrown its weight behind a form of the game that would offend purists and surprise most everyone else: women’s sumo.

When the International Olympic Committee declared in 1994 that single-sex sports could no longer qualify as candidates for the Games, that was enough to turn tradition that featured giant men with topknots shoving each other in a ring on its head. Since then, sumo has been coming into its own internationally as an equal opportunity sport.

Such a radical change to Japan’s ancient national sport did not come easy, and the initial push came from outside the country. Among those who lobbied the I.F.S., as the sumo federation is commonly known, was Stephen Gadd, the general secretary of the European Sumo Union and president of the Netherlands Sumo Federation.

Men’s sumo first started gaining a following internationally in the mid-1980s as part of a campaign by Japan to spread its culture internationally. More than a decade later, women’s sumo started gaining followers as the I.F.S., which oversees 87 member nations, started pushing for a women’s version of the sport.

“We held the very first women’s sumo tournament with the European Championships in 1996,” he said. “After that, it really took off in Europe.”

For Japanese women, their biggest hurdle came from a stigma that can be traced back to the 18th century, when, as entertainment for men, topless women sumo-wrestled blind men. Though this lewd variety eventually faded away in the mid-20th century after being banned repeatedly, a little-known ceremonial form has continued in regional festivals.

So when the Women’s Sumo Federation was set up in Japan in 1996, Japanese women were hardly clamoring to get involved, given the common belief that women just do not do sumo. After all, they had always been kept out of legitimate competition because of the sport’s cardinal rule: Women cannot touch or enter the sacred wrestling ring, the “dohyo,” lest they contaminate it with their “impurity.”

“In the professional sumo world,” said Gadd, “women in sumo is as unthinkable as a rabbi sponsoring a pork farm.”

But along with the rise of amateur sumo abroad, women’s sumo in Japan has been making strides. “A growing number of women are involved, certainly in the hundreds,” said Katrina Watts, president of the Australian Sumo Federation and a stadium announcer for sumo events, including the World Championships. “I’d say it’s a good sport for women because it’s a body contact sport without being violent.”

However, in Japan, Shinsaku Takeuchi, head of the Women’s Sumo Federation, said that in recent years women had been getting better and tougher. “Women’s sumo is becoming even more vicious than the men’s,” he said.

Nowadays, girls can even go to high school or college on a sumo scholarship. There are women-only tournaments, like the All-Japan Women’s Sumo Championships, which took place this month in Osaka. Takeuchi organized the event where 40 of the top sumotori in the country gathered for the 15th edition.

Takeuchi explained that what set amateur sumo apart from professional was the inclusion of gender and weight classes and the removal of the religious ceremonies, which are still very much a part of men’s professional sumo. Amateur sumo has also been spared the recent scandals that have tainted professional sumo in Japan.

Originally performed as a Shinto ritual to entertain the gods so they would bestow a good harvest, the sport dates back well over a thousand years. It is a trial of strength in which 48 techniques may be employed to throw an opponent off balance so he steps out of the ring or falls to the ground. A match begins with a head-on collision, followed by a wild fit of shoving, lifting, throwing, tripping, slapping, yanking or any combination thereof. It is often over in less than 10 seconds but can last a minute or more.

Yuka Ueta, 18, was the strongest wrestler of the tournament. At 125 kilograms, or 275 pounds, she plowed her way through five matches in the open weight class.

In August, competing among the world’s top sumo wrestlers, she won a bronze medal at the Sportaccord Combat Games in Beijing, her best showing yet at an international tournament. But at the World Championships over the weekend in Warsaw, she did not fare as well, placing fifth in the open weight class. Ueta got into sumo at age 10 when she was encouraged to give it a try.

Though Japanese women make up the greatest number of participants, Europeans tend to dominate, which was the case in Warsaw. East Europeans won gold medals in three out of four divisions, and the only Japanese medalist of the tournament was the lightweight Yukina Iwamoto, who took a silver medal, losing to Alina Boykova of Ukraine.

As for the battle to make it into the Olympics, Gadd says the best chance is if Japan hosts the 2020 games. “Getting into the Olympics will give sumo the push it needs to become a major international sport,” he said.


Resource from: http://www.nytimes.com