I came across a news that Google has decided to abandon its answers services. According to Google’s official blog, it wrote, “Later this week, we will stop accepting new questions in Google Answers, the very first project we worked on here. The project started with a rough idea from Larry Page, and a small 4-person team turned it into reality in less than 4 months.

Google Answers was a great experiment which provided us with a lot of material for developing future products to serve our users. We’ll continue to look for new ways to improve the search experience and to connect people to the information they want.”

As I analyze why this action has been taken by Google, There are several clues that have prompted Google to shuts its answers services down.

1) The pay-per-answer model is failed. With Google oversell its search capabilities, people tend to search an answer on the web through its search engine rather than paying them a fee from the range of US2 to as high as US200. On the other hand, Yahoo!’s Answers services doesn’t charge money. Instead, Yahoo! appeals to the vanity of smart people to ferret out the answers for them. Yahoo! has thus capitalize the concept of web 2.0 and currently they have created a community members of over 65 million answers (up-to-date) all around the world.

2) Google Answers ranked low amongst all the available Google domains. According to the Hitwise Intelligence’s blog posting, Google Answers did not gained popularity amongst Google’s varied services, it has only 0.09% of market share and ranked as No. 14 as at 5/13/06. This considered as an unpopular Google subdomain to the public, as Hitwise Intelligence showed their analysis in the chart below:

Source: http://weblogs.hitwise.com/bill-tancer/2006/05/google_properties_understandin.html

3) It really is remarkable how badly Google Answers is doing against Yahoo! Answers. Frankly, I never would have thought that. As another Hitwise Intelligence’s blog posting, it wrote, “At present, Yahoo! Answers is over 50x the market share (in visits) of the new Live QnA and 24x of Google Anwers.” In this blog posting, they also provided a chart that represent the current market share gained by the aforesaid players.

Source: http://weblogs.hitwise.com/bill-tancer/2006/11/charting_answers.html

4) It seems the Google Answers did not successfully integrate with the Google’s search strategy, with the acquisition of Writely, JotSpot, and iRows, I expected they would likely to concentrate their synergy toward some other projects that may work well for them.

5) My sense is that Google is more “robotic, machine-like” company, but in contrast Yahoo! has created a sense that they look more “human”, no doubt the chances Yahoo! to be succeed in the fields of social search, or some other services such as answer services is much higher in the market.

I wish Yahoo! Answers good luck. Stay tuned.

There are several articles pertaining to Oracle security issues, unsurprisingly, you will come across an article entitled, “Oracle has more flaws than SQL Server”, or “Oracle databases four times worse than Microsoft” and similar type of articles on the web. I just came across an research paper, entitled, “Dangling Cursor Snarfing: A New Class of Attack in Oracle” (pdf). Some excerpts:

we’ll now execute it as a low privileged user - but when we do so we’ll cause an exception in it by passing it too long a string:

The session now has a dangling cursor which can be snarfed by an attacker. Note from the output of PWD_COMPARE that the cursor has a value of 3 in this case. Incidentally,
even without seeing it’s 3 an attacker can still “guess” the value for the dangling cursor by going from 1 to n in a loop until they find it. When the attacker finds the dangling cursor, they can then recycle it – in other words they can rebind the username associated with the query and this time use SYS if they so choose.

My sense is that the above research study pessimistically stated the attack based on the two following assumptions below:

1) The database administrator (DBA) and security managers didn’t do their job and hence, allow an attacker a manner to steal the confidential data.

2) Users’ own problems. They failed to or improperly close the cursors that they created or failed to clean up the open cursors. Thus, we need to educate the users in using Oracle database properly.

In such above analysis, why we need to blame Oracle? If we regularly patch and secure the database’s configuration, we will be reasonably protected from the above attack.

Meanwhile, Oracle hits back at the above security critics by wrote a blog posting in response to the above security issues. Some excerpts:

Because software engineering is a complex discipline, the absence of security flaws in released software cannot be fully guaranteed. Such flaws may be detected during internal testing, or may be discovered externally by customers and security researchers. Regardless of who discovers these issues, Oracle’s top priority is to efficiently fix those flaws across all supported platforms in order to allow customers to maintain their security posture. This means that Oracle prioritizes those security flaws in order of severity, regardless of how they were discovered, in order to produce the appropriate fix. This also means that we acknowledge all of the vulnerabilities at the time of the issuance of the appropriate fix (for example, at the time of the Critical Patch Update) and we credit security researchers for any vulnerability they discovered in the Critical Patch Update documentation.

However, we do not credit security researchers who disclose the existence of vulnerabilities before a fix is available. We consider such practices, including disclosing “zero day” exploits, to be irresponsible as they can result in needlessly exposing customers to risk of attack.

My view is it is too early to say Oracle do not care about fixing their bugs, it is just the customers that dissatisfied with the Oracle’s security record. On the other hand, I really believed Oracle are getting better in manage the vulnerabilities in their products. If there are reports that stated bug found in Oracle’s products, whom have we to find fault with? The researchers that should bear the social responsibility? Or Oracle that did not release the most updated security patch? Or the customers that are not patch and secure their configuration in their databases? Moreover, if there has been a large scale attack targeting Oracle databases, we definitely been heard the Oracle customers switching to the competing products in the market.

I just came across this report (pdf) from Nielsen/NetRatings. Google and Ask.com are the fastest-growing search engines based on the number of U.S. searches. This report showed growth of 23 percent and 25 percent respectively in October 2006, compared with the year before. In market share, it showed Ask.com in fifth place, just behind AOL.

Though Ask.com they are not updated their index as quickly as Google, and even when I search my own weblog through them, it showed no result with TagEdge.com (up to this moment), however they did provided a different search experience for me. Whenever I want to search a working paper, the results showed the information that I want for me in a fast manner without having to enter an elaborate boolean search query.

I believed in the search industry, Ask.com has thus established their credibility as the most significant challenger to Google. They are more user-friendly, attributed to their fewer advertisements strategy. They do not believe this search business is about advertising. Thus, the concept of “fail to compete on advertising is to fail” is not valid in Ask.com.

When you look at their technology. The Smart Answers for the purpose of suggested links; the Zoom feature that allows people to narrow or broaden a search; Binoculars that offers a web page’s preview; the walking directions from their map services; the “ExpertRank”, a totally different ranking system when compared to PageRank of Google, and etc. They have improved a lot in their search engine. I wonder they offer social search?

For now, I’m just waiting for some of these underdogs, one of them is Ask.com inventing their technologies and turn themselves into significant players.

The PeopleSoft co-founder David Duffield and former vice chairman Aneel Bhusri introduced a new generation of on-demand solutions called Workday Human Capital Management this month (Click here). This is a web-based software for human resources management, created by their new company, i.e. Workday.com founded in March 2005.

There are anticipations on the web that Workday would be marked as the software return of the above listed PeopleSoft co-founder and former executives. I am not surprise of Workday that launched the human resources or financial applications. That fields are their strengths. Moreover, they have the experiences of running PeopleSoft from early stage and expanded it to multi-national. Since PeopleSoft is now owned by Oracle, is this Workday going to be PeopleSoft 2.0? I also see Workday’s increasing marketing strength, particularly in the products that offered. Workday run their products on a business model that called multi-tenant software service, similarly to Salesforce.com. They now have a better understanding of the market, their products are more towards web-based, thus this is certainly more end-users oriented.

However, I’m doubtful of the long-term successful of Workday. In this convergence of technology trends today, with a good business model and new product technology is not enough. In software industry, big is always beautiful, Workday as a new start-up, how it is going to sustain in the software industry and fend off the takeover of competitors will still remain as a question?

Is Friendster a social network no one talk about anymore? It seems true in the U.S.; In the comScore Media Metrix press release, Friendster not even listed in the Top 10 most visitors social network site, but it was not in Asia. It gained huge popularity in Asia South.

According to the New York Times (registration required), three quarters of Friendster’s users live outside the United States, mainly in the Philippines, Malaysia and other, smaller southeast Asian countries. Another source also stated that Friendster ranked at the top position for social networking websites in Singapore, with 56.3% market share for the week ending July 15, 2006.

Why Friendster mean so special to the Asian? I believed the main reason is due to the peer pressure. One would probably would not join a new social networking site if he/she never even heard of it. If your friends was there, you were allured to it definitely. It really didn’t take much persuading in the process. This works for Asian especially Asian view trust as an important element in building a long-lasting friendship. Take a look at the picture above, you will see there are similar characteristics amongst groups of people available in Friendster. You probably can call it cultural or localization factors. The same holds true for a guy if he wanted to look for good-looking girls, he probably tried to locate her somewhere in his comfort-zone, i.e. near his home address. Moreover, my opinion is Asians seem to be quite loyal to the things or sites they get used to, thus Friendster gained dominant in Asia South easily. For this reason, I know it’s a bit harsh to say Friendster is an Asian social networking site. But sooner or later, it would going to happen in that way.

The way I see it, it’s a huge opportunity for Friendster to further establish itself in Asia. If Friendster could capitalize its first-mover advantage in Asia South, Friendster still get the chance to become a multibillion-dollar company.

The other day I came across the website above that retail the German & Japanese RC1 version of Windows Vista. You may wonder, why Microsoft selected German & Japanese amongst many languages? Why not French, Mandarin, Korean, and etc.? Why German & Japanese got that kind of premium services? In attempting to find out the answer, I did came across some sources stated that both German & Japanese are complicated and hard to read and write. Thus, in theoretical if translating a software to German & Japanese, if that’s work well, so it would work for the other languages as well.

In technological setting, my sense is that it is unfair for the German & Japanese languages. I strongly believed the reason Microsoft launched German, Japanese versions besides English version was based on the consideration of the competitive advantage of nation, Per capita GDP, and purchasing power of these two countries, i.e. Germany & Japan.

As according to moneyweek.com, the United States, Japan, and Germany still collectively account for 43% of world GDP as measured in dollar-based market exchange rates. In particular, German business competitiveness is ranked second only to the United States and well above that of the UK (#8) and Japan (#9) — to say nothing of France (#16), Spain (#30), and Italy (#38). This explained why the Germans and Japanese would enjoy the privilege of using Windows Vista in their own language first.

Bottom Line: If you are considering translating a software to other languages other than English, consider the above factors such as competitive advantage of nation, Per capita GDP, and etc. Doing so is just good business.

Finally, I have moved my blog, i.e. kennylee.wordpress.com to my own domain. All my past posts of kennylee.wordpress.com have transferred to this site. I bought tagedge.com domain name as well as registered a new Media Temple account. In addition, I have done an installation of WordPress 2.0.4. this morning. I have encountered several problems in moving this blog. I deeply appreciated the generous advices from the Media Temple customer service and technical personnel and eventually the transfer from wordpress.com to this site was almost smooth.

Thank you and stay tuned.

I bought a few domain names. I have been sitting on it without any idea what to do with them for some time now. Yesterday I finally want to use one of them. I always told myself, someday I will run a blog with my own domain name, not any sub-domain with blogspot, wordpress, typepad, or squarespace.com. But I know someday never come, a lot of good ideas failed before even getting started. I had to do it now before I changed my mind again. So my first step was I export my blog in XML format to my PC. I was a fan of Internet Explorer (IE)7, unfortunately, I couldn’t export my blog by using IE7, while there’s no problem when I did it with Firefox2.

Again! You really won’t believe how annoy I feel about IE7 today. I was using it to sign-up a webhosting package and when I reach the check-out stage, IE7 keep on displaying, i.e. “Please wait while we processing your order.” I attempted for six times, just can’t get through. I have to close the window everytime and recheck-out it again and again. I even called the webhosting company in the U.S. and asked one of the representative whether their server having problem at that particular time. I know I am very rude upon asking this kind of question. I am. Finally, I made up my mind to use Firefox2. For the very first time my webhosting package order was completed by using this browser.

Furthermore, this is my very first time I stumbled upon the extremely usefulness of Firefox2.