Michael Arrington at TechCrunch talks about a “top secret” meeting at Google where plans were announced to tackle the Facebook challenge head on. Read more here.

Robert Scoble praises startup SceneCaster which he says will allow people to embed “scenes” into web pages and Facebook and so on. This he says has several advantages which may make Second Life more accessible to commercial organisations – in particular:

• large numbers of people can enter a scene
• linking to scenes becomes really easy

The service, which isn’t officially launched until tomorrow, is one company missed off this year’s Demofall 07 – a pity says Scoble.

FeedHub is a new service, showing for the first time at the Demo conference, which aims to be a custom version of TechMeme. The idea is that you load your feeds and then train it which posts are most relevant and it then acts like Techmeme to identify the most important one.

Scoble has some concerns:

1. how big is the market? (how many people have 800 feeds?)
2. how will they make money? If by ads, won’t that put off the customers?
3. what about the attention information they will get?

Google’s long-awaited presentation application has been launched. It’s not very fully-featured but it’s a start and no doubt Microsoft will be watching with great interest.

Update: I think I missed one of the really important things here: it’s the online collaboration companies like Webex who should be the first to worry about Google Presentation as it makes simple presentation sharing over the internet with nothing to install really, really simple….

Technorati Tags: Google, Microsoft, tools

Google has launched “shared stuff” which is a system for sharing web pages with comments to a page on the web connected to a public profile. A response to Facebook? Maybe. It’s really like a stripped down Google Notebook.

Technorati Tags: Google, social media

Google is launching Gadget Ads, rich, interactive advertising in Google’s “gadget” widget format which can run anywhere on the Google ad network. The main difference, apart from the flexibility of the rich media environment, is that these ads can be added by users to other sites or to iGoogle pages allowing a viral dimension to advertising for the first time. Interesting move. Jeff Jarvis thinks this will put Google in competition with the publishers it has always claimed to have a symbiotic relationship with.

Technorati Tags: advertising, Google

A new widget from the Washington Post provides some insight into the kinds of widgets which could be developed to add value to news in a distributed world. It shows at a glance the major issues and candidates for the US presidency and has a time slider which allows you to compare coverage on each topic by candidate.

Technorati Tags: newspapers, widgets

Mozilla is floating off Thunderbird, its email program, to allow it to follow its own development path, which may include becoming a communications hub for social networks like Facebook, reports PaidContent.

Technorati Tags: tools

Google’s AdSense has launched for mobile devices

Technorati Tags: advertising, Google, mobile

Google’s long-awaited presentation application has been launched. It’s not very fully-featured but it’s a start and no doubt Microsoft will be watching with great interest.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Google, tools