SiliconBeat

Facebook has topped Google’s Orkut to become the top social network in Brazil, the world’s fifth largest country and Internet market, comScore will announce later today. That’s a huge win for Facebook, because Brazil for years has been a stronghold of Google’s Orkut social network.

The switch reflects Facebook’s rapid growth in much of the developing world, particularly in South America and Asia, countries that are now providing the lion’s share of Facebook’s growth, with membership approaching the saturation point in countries like the U.S. and Britain.

Here’s my story on that topic:  http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_19723521

comScores said that in December 2011, Facebook.com attracted 36.1 million visitors, a 192 percent jump in traffic over the previous  twelve months, meaning it passed Orkut, even though  – to surpass Orkut as the leading social networking destination in the market.

In an early view of the release later today, comScore said:

“Facebook’s rapid ascent in the Brazilian market has certainly been one of the most interesting stories to develop during the course of 2011,” said Alex Banks, comScore managing director for Brazil. “Brazil has always been a particularly social market and currently owns the fifth largest social networking population in the world. But despite the cultural affinity for social media, Facebook adoption had traditionally lagged in the market. That has all changed in the past year, during which the site has tripled in audience size as engagement has grown sevenfold to assume the leadership position in the market.”

- Mike Swift

Twitter clearly views Google’s new social search features, which highlights postings by the searcher’s Google+ friend connections, as a direct threat to its bread and butter - - serving as the default place on the Web where people go to learn about breaking news, whether it comes from an individual or a news organization.

Tuesday, within hours after Google announced its new “Search - Plus your World” service, Twitter complained in a written statement released to the media that:

Search example from Twitter general counsel, Alex Macgillivray

Macgillivary’s Tweet linked to an example of a Google search. He is saying, essentially, is that a person searching  Google for “@wwe”, the Twitter account of the professional wrestling organization, will instead now be steered to Google+ content.  The Twitter account result was there, but it was well down the page.

It will be interesting to see watch whether Twitter takes things to the next level and files a formal complaint with the FTC. Twitter spokesman Matt Graves declined to comment Wednesday afternoon.

Since the announcement that it was killing Google Wave, Google has turned on the spin by proclaiming how they “celebrate our failures.” There is a lot to admire about Google, and one of those things is its ability to experiment and, as CEO Eric Schmidt said, “try things.” It’s not just hard for many organizations to find the culture and capacity to do that, it’s hard for them to acknowledge when those things don’t work.

Danny Sullivan, at Search Engine Land, mapped out many of Google’s most notable recent failures, and wondered just what the company was really gaining in terms of knowledge:

“But in its statements to the world, Google rarely sounds like it’s celebrating these missteps. It doesn’t really document anything that was learned. It just seems to say as little as possible to move on.”

But the bigger problem I see at Google is its approach to developing those new things. Just because you enable it, or allow it, doesn’t mean your approach to you develop new products and services. And what strikes me about Google is that so many of these products seemed dead on arrival.

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After spending the morning at f8, the Facebook developers conference, I’m convinced more than ever that Facebook is about to take over the whole Web. And by the whole Web, I mean, well, all of it.

And if Google isn’t trembling over this, they ought to be. We might look back at this day as the moment when Facebook set itself on a path to eventually dwarf Google in size, power, and eventually, revenues.

Simply put, Facebook is positioning itself to become deeply embedded in almost every single website. And the way it’s structuring this platform, it places Facebook itself at the center of Web more than ever.

Here’s why I think Facebook is about to become a monster.

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One of the most significant trends I’ve been watching over the past decade is the dramatic drop in public companies in Silicon Valley. Naturally, that number was artificially inflated during the dot-com bubble when it reached 417 in 2000. For our purposes, Silicon Valley includes San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, and the southern half of Alameda County.

But the number of public companies has dropped for nine straight years now. Even when IPOs briefly reappeared in 2006 and 2007, they weren’t enough to overcome the net loss of public companies through acquisitions or bankruptcy.

In 2008, the number had fallen to 261. We just updated our records and the latest figure is 241.

That’s not just less than the dot-com era, that’s well below the 315 public companies the valley had in 1994 when the Mercury News started keeping track.

Here’s why I think this is a big deal.

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Google Buzz is here. And the big question is this: Can Google finally get in the social game? After playing around with Google Buzz for a bit today, I’ll say the jury is out for me. But I have a few thoughts, and will have more after I’ve played with it for a few weeks.

The first impulse I have is to fight is the despair over creating and learning a new social networking tool. Facebook and Twitter work well for me, despite some imperfections. I won’t say there isn’t room for improvement. But any new service has to clear a pretty high barrier to become part of my daily routine.

After digging in and following a few friends on Google Buzz, the next thing that strikes me as interesting about Google Buzz is how much it mirrors the approach to social that Yahoo is taking. And there’s something I wouldn’t expect to be writing: How Google is following Yahoo. Read the rest of this entry »

We learned in late December that Yelp turned down an acquisition offer from Google reported to be worth $500 million. Yelp then raised $25 million from Elevation Partners, with another $75 million possibly coming down the road.

It may need that money to ward off Google, which is ramping up its local advertising offerings. The new service places Yelp directly in Google’s scope. And I wonder if it won’t lead Yelp to regret not selling when they had the chance.

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Over the weekend, my column looked at the remarkable growth in Google’s lobbying operation in Washington, D.C. In just four years, Google has become the valley’s second largest company when it comes to lobbying expenditures.

Naturally, I left out a some details. While the story focused on money, there are other ways Google has been trying to extend its influence. And their adoption of these strategies shows how quickly the company has become savvy in the ways of Washington.

Let’s run through a few of these.

Google’s lobbying team includes the usual requisite of former government officials from agencies that have been having an impact on the company’s business. The lobbying team includes former employees from the Justice Department, Treasury, the FCC, and Congressional staffs, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

One of the interesting things you can see from that data at CPR’s OpenSecrets.org is the growing range of issues that Google is lobbying on. In 2009, the top issues included advertising, energy, trade, telecom and anti-trust. Of those, only trade was listed among Google’s issues in 2005. And the list of agencies and branches of government that Google lobbies has grown extensively.

Of course, it’s no surprise that anti-trust is near the top of the list of issues. Just in the last couple of years, Google faced this anti-trust inquiries with its acquisition of DoubleClick, saw its search deal with Yahoo scuttled, and now faces a review of its plans to buy AdMob.

Google has also been savvy about hiring former government officials in non-lobbying positions. For instance, in 2008 and 2009, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was concerned about some of the ways Google was accounting for various costs related to traffic acquisition, and also had questions about whether the company was being transparent enough on some issues such as whether or not it was disclosing enough information about letting a large group of contractors go. These questions were all resolved without the SEC taking any formal actions. The Google official reponding to those questions? It was Mark Fuchs, Google’s vice president of finance and chief accountant, who used to work at the SEC.

Going in the other direction, several Google employees have gone to work in the Obama administration:

• Andrew McLauglin, former Google policy chief, serves as Obama’s deputy chief technology officer.
• Katie Stanton, former principal of Google’s New Business Development team, is now Obama’s director of citizen participation.
• Sonal Shah, a Google lobbyist and head of global development issues at Google.org, served as an adivsor on the Obama transition team. She previously worked in the Treasury Department.
• Sumit Agarwal, Google’s head of mobile product management, will become deputy assistant secretary of defense for outreach and social media in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense ,it was announced last week.
• CEO Eric Schmidt is a member of President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

In addition, Schmidt has become chair of the New America Foundation, a non-partisan Wahshington think tank. That’s a lot of involvement in D.C. for a guy who told the Washington Post last fall he doesn’t care much for the scene:

As for Google’s relationship with Washington’s power structure, Schmidt said the tech industry is still not as strong as others in its lobbying representation on Capitol Hill, but that that’s fine with him. Google, and the tech industry, does better for itself when it focuses on ideas and innovation — and not politics, he said.

“The part of politics in Washington that’s ‘who you know’ and all that kind of stuff, it’s just not very interesting,” he said.

The company has also established a summer policy fellowship where it funds about a dozen or more undergraduate and graduate students to work with various policy organizations. Those include some that have found themselves on the opposite side of issues from Google. For instance, last summer, Google paid for one Wisconsin student to work at the American Library Association, an organization that has been opposing the company’s plans to scan books.

As I noted in the column, none of this is illegal, or unusual. What bears watching is how Google uses this growing influence. There are a lot of issues where I agree with them, and am glad to have them fighting. But there are others where I disagree (i.e., book search)

But when it comes to Washington msucle, you certainly can’t call them the underdog anymore.

Motorola Cliq

When Motorola announced the Cliq smartphone in September, I was pretty intrigued.

I wrote a column about how I thought the Cliq’s interface could represent “the next stage in the evolution of the smart-phone.” I think now that I might have overstated the case.

The Cliq was the first Motorola phone to run Google’s Android operating system. What I found interesting about it was that Motorola had built a custom interface on top of Android that it calls Motoblur. Read the rest of this entry »

Looks like it’s full steam ahead for Google. Revenues rose 17 percent to $6.7 billion. Non-GAAP earnings jumped 35 percent to $2.2 billion.