Google Docs Gets A Visual Overhaul, Now More Office Like

Google has quietly updated the look of Google Docs, offering a more Microsoft Office (pre 2007) like interface.

First spotted by Philipp Lenssen, the changes aren’t huge, but visually they’re pleasing. Gone is the Google Docs blue background toolbar with its unique layout. In its place is a grey toolbar that will be immediately familiar to users of other offline and online office packages. Fonts now have a dedicated box with the list being rendered in the particular font listed. Text sizing also gets a familiar drop down box as well.

The changes have been rolled out across the three core Google Docs products (Writely, Spreadsheets and Presentations).

Although still not as fully featured as offline alternatives, and even some online competitors as well, Google Docs has gained strong support in the first adopter community and is slowly finding a market in the business world as Google pushes its corporate packages. The new look will make it easier for new users to immediately use Google Docs and that will help sell the package.

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Quarterlife Might Not Have A Long Life On NBC

Quarterlife, the made for MySpace TV show that became the first internet show picked up by a TV network has bombed.

According to Nielsen Ratings for Tuesday night, Quarterlife managed only 3.86 million viewers for its 10pm debut on NBC, compared to the fan resurrected but short second season of Jericho with 6.9 million viewers and Primetime: What Would You Do Now? with 7.6 million viewers.

Although no decision has been made as to whether Quarterlife will return for a second outing next week, these poor figures would suggest that Quarterlife may not have a long life on NBC.

Some may suggest that Quaterlife’s failure to make a successful cross from online to network TV isn’t a positive for future shows following the same path; certainly it doesn’t make things easier. A first failed experiment won’t necessarily mean the crossover idea will fail again in the future. As more and more people turn to the internet for entertainment, the volume of professionally made video content will continue to increase, and sheer numbers would suggest that Quaterlife may become the first of many crossovers to come as television networks scramble to find new content that viewers want to watch.

(via RWW)

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Favoritâs RSS reader integrates commenting

Fav.or.it, the RSS reader with integrated commenting (a story TechCrunch UK broke), has launched its beta, though you’ll still need an invite to get in while they scale up.

With Fav.or.it you can make comments on blog posts from within its reader - no need to click into a browser to the original post. Disqus, the distributed commenting system, will be using the fav.or.it API. So if you use Disqus for comments, fav.or.it users will be able to leave comments too. Fav.or.it is more feature rich than Google Reader and has community features like story voting, sharing, tagging. The site already has lots of feeds to pick from and an approach called slices. Some developers are already building features on top of Google Reader’s shared items data, such as ReadBurner and RSSMeme. But fav.or.it is as early as any of those guys, so it’s still a wide ope! n game.

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fav.or.it

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Microsoft WorldWide Telescope Presented at TED; Huge Expectations Set

So the rest of us can’t quite cry along with Robert Scoble - not just yet - but the attendees of TED had the opportunity to do so today when Microsoft presented the stargazing software we wrote about last week called WorldWide Telescope.

Microsoft has launched a website for the service that says “coming in spring 2008″ and provides a FAQ sheet along with a couple video montages of people reacting to the product. These videos don’t show the product in any substantial way but rather serve to further the hype (apparently it wows not only tech bloggers, but children, well-renowned professors, and other experts as well).

Few people have seen the product yet, but based on the testimonials on the website, it better be significantly better than the existing Google Sky, which launched last August as part of Google Earth, and the open source Stellarium (which is hugely better than Google Sky already).

Below is the only screenshot of the product that has been published so far. From what we can gather from the website, WWT is built on top of Microsoft’s Visual Experience Engine. It will also sport these features:

- WorldWide Telescope is an observatory on your desktop, allowing you to see the sky in a way you have never seen before; individual exploration, multi-wavelength views, stars and planets within context to each other, zoom in/out, and a capability for anyone to create and share a tour of the universe.
- The Visual Experience Engine delivers seamless panning zooming around the night sky.
- WWT delivers seamless integration of science:-relevant information including multi-wavelength, multiple telescope distributed image and data sets, and one-click contextual access to distributed Web information and data sources.

The product is based on Jim Gray’s SkyServer and is therefore considered an extension of his work.

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Kijiji Talks Smack About Craigslist: âWe Will Be No. 1 In the U.S.â

Why can’t brothers and sisters just get along? As I noted earlier this month, eBay’s free classifieds site Kijiji is coming on strong since its launch in the U.S. last summer. Of course, eBay owns 25 percent of Craigslist, but since the other 75 percent is not for sale, eBay is putting all of its eggs into Kijiji and taking Craigslist head on.

In January, Kijiji had 2.3 million U.S. visitors, which made it the sixth largest classifieds site in the U.S., according to comScore. In six months, Kijiji has grown to be about ten percent the size of Craigslist (which had 26.7 million unique visitors in the U.S.). Worldwide, the numbers are much closer. Kijiji had 21.6 million visitors in January, compared to Craigslist’s 27.8 million.

Yesterday, Jacob Aqraou stopped by my office. He is the eBay executive who runs Kijiji and eBay’s other classifieds sites around the world (including Marketplaats in the Netherlands, Loquo in Spain, and Gumtree in the UK, Australia, South Africa, and Poland). All told, Kijiji operates sites across 700 cities in 20 countries. But Aqraou was pretty clear about who he wants to kill:

We play to win. We will win in the U.S. Six months in, the U.S. is the best launch we have had and we have not put any money into it. This year we will make significant inroads. And we will be No. 1 in the U.S.

He is not claiming that he will pass Craigslist this year, but he does not strike me as a patient man. Why did eBay launch Kijiji in the first place back in 2005? Says Aqraou:

We did not believe Craigslist was going to be successful internationally with an English-only site. Craigslist has had zero localization. It is all English, run out of San Francisco.

And that is not his only problem with Craigslist. He contends that the bare-bones site has failed to evolve:

They went lean and that allowed them to be early when there was no revenue. The site still looks the same as it did 12 years ago. Users expect more. The bar goes up in terms of user interface, trust, and safety. If you stay still, you get run over.

Now, there is revenueâ€"advertising. And that is bringing the sharks into Craigslist’s once-friendly, non-profit waters. Kijiji is eBay’s fastest growing business. Revenues worldwide grew 104 percent last quarter (from what base, eBay will not say). Expect to see a big marketing push this year on eBay’s part to drive traffic to Kijiji in the U.S. Fees for featuring items, improvements to the site’s navigation, and tools for easier listings are also coming soon.

It doesn’t matter how beautiful a classifieds site is if you cannot find anything there. In terms of the sheer number of listings and things you can find on each siteâ€"the single most important factor for successâ€"Kijiji still has a long way to go to catch up with Craigslist. But Aqraou does have a point about Craigslist’s user interface. Searching for stuff is hard. You can’t sort by price. And there are no images in the results pages (only on individual item pages).

Does Craig Newmark have anything to worry about, or is Aqroau just talking smack?

Here is Kijiji:

And here is Craigslist:

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Kijiji

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The Global Race Among Social Networks Heats Up. Keep an Eye on Hi5, Friendster, and Imeem

In the global race to be the top social network, MySpace and Facebook are neck and neck. In January, 2008, MySpace was still the biggest social network worldwide with 109 million unique visitors, according to comScore. But Facebook was close on its heels with 101 million. (Meanwhile, the data in the U.S. for Facebook at least shows a possible slowdown in growth).

While MySpace and Facebook are fighting it out for the top spot, back in the second pack some interesting sprints and scuffles are going on that are worth keeping an eye on. Everyone in that second pack (Hi5, Freindster, Orkut, Bebo, Imeem) are about a third to a quarter the size of the leaders in terms of worldwide unique visitors, so I’ve isolated their performance in the chart above (it is harder to see if you include Nos. 1 and 2, MySpace and Facebook).

In January, both Hi5 (No. 3, in red) and Friendster (No. 4, in blue), made moves to pull away from Google’s Orkut (No. 5, in green) and Bebo (No. 6, in yellow). The latter two maintained a more steady pace. Coming on strong from behind is Imeem (No. 7, in purple), which surpassed Multiply (No. 8, not shown). The chart below has most of the stats, except for the last twoâ€"Imeem had 17.8 million global visitors in January, 2008, a 477 percent annual growth rate (Multiply had 17.6 million, a healthy 203 percent rise from the year before).

For Hi5 and Friendster, global growth is a major part of their game plan. Friendster, for instance, which dropped off the radar for most of us in the U.S., is now the single largest social network in Asia. It’s top five countries are the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, the United States (legacy members who never left, plus new growth among Asians here), and Singapore. Friendster has kept its growth going by launching fan profile pages for Asian pop singers, launching four new languages since September (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish), and letting developers create apps for its site.

So does that mean that Friendster and Hi5 are worth more than the $1 billion Bebo is rumored to have sold itself for? Not necessarily. It depends on the actual composition of their members, click-through rates, and other financial factors. Generally speaking, advertisers like to target their campaigns by geography, and pay less for ads that target populations with lower per-capita spending power than in the U.S., Japan, or Europe. So not all members are worth the same to advertisers, and thus to potential acquirers. But as social networks become saturated here in the U.S., everyone will have to look overseas to keep growing.

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Imeem

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Zoho Writer Gets An UpdateâMore Than One Million Documents Served

Web-based word processors keep closing the gap with Microsoft Office. Since its launch, Zoho now has 650,000 users, a 30 percent increase from just last November, the company tells us. It is doing 2 million user sessions per month. And its users have created more than one million documents on Zoho Writer (1.6 million, if you include its online presentation and spreadsheet products, Zoho Show and Zoho Sheets).

Today, Zoho released an update to Zoho Writer that includes:

Docx Supporâ€"the ability to export documents in the new docx Word file format (this is in addition to existing support for doc, txt, html, pdf, odf, sxw, rtf files).

Thesaurusâ€"a thesaurus in ten languages (English, Czech, German, Greek, French, Irish, Italian, Polish, Russian, and Slovak).

Groupsâ€"Now you can save emails forgroups instead of re-entering each one every time you want to share a document.

Enhanced support for Endnotes/Footnotes, Headers/Footersâ€"Formatting is now maintained when a document is exported, as are manual page breaks.

Zoho still has along way to go to catch up to Microsoft Word, and it trails Google Docs in usage, but it is making steady progress.

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