Google has sponsored a project at the Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute to “rethink and reinvent online social networking”. This was largely to overcome problems with its Orkut network.

“Directed to help improve the online community orkut, the project’s scope was not to simply redesign the interface. Our team considered how online social networking could bring greater value to users, especially for ages above twenty. After initial brainstorming and research, we chose to focus on the effects of a new model for online social networking: a unified social network that, as a service, provides social data to many other applications.”

Socialstream, as the network is called, is able to “draw content from a variety of sources. Socialstream would be based on a unified social network (USN), a single network that provides social data to other sites as a service. A service model allows many social networks to be linked together, letting them share both content and the nature of the relationships of the people who use them.”

This idea is to allow users to centralize information about contacts on different social networks in a single place — assuming, of course, that the other networks have an API and don’t act like walled gardens. Socialstream uses data from blogging and photo-sharing sites like Blogger, Flickr and Picasa Web Albums.

“Socialstream emphasizes improving social connections by making it more efficient to communicate with, share with, and view the social content of all the people in a user’s online social network. Socialstream provides a compelling user experience because it aggregates content across many different networks so a user has a single location to discover new content and communicate. The goal of Socialstream is to present social information in a way that ties it to the person who posted the information, and not the site from which it came.”

This could be an interesting project to watch.

Internet advertising is increasing rapidly on all measures. A need is developing for a big player to step up to the plate and provide a Big-Ad Lite service. Now Google is moving into this marketplace and, as with Adsense, it’s likely to set the standard.

The Wall Street Journal reports :

The biggest Internet companies, including Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc., are focusing attention and money on the emerging business, hoping to be first with the kind of large-scale, dynamic market for the ad industry that the Nasdaq market brought to stocks. […] Today, online publications and Internet companies have space for display ads built into their Web sites. Typically, that space gets filled with ads either the old-fashioned way — through a salesperson — or by a mix of computers and people called an ad network that automatically sells ads for the spot. But a significant portion of the available ad space — called “inventory” — remains unsold, or is sold for next to nothing. Enter the exchanges, which use automated systems to match buyers with sellers of unsold space.

This is good news for a significant swathe of small online businesses stuck between the vast mass of “blogs” beneath and the bigco websites above.

If Google can come up with an automatic solution as simple and seller-friendly as Text Link Ads, with geo-location and other factors built in, it will take mass advertising on the net to a new level. It will also improve the bottom lines of small-business digital networks beyond recognition.

Google’s buy-out of DoubleClick provides the platform. This could be the most exciting development for online business in years, taking advertising from professional operators to ordinary publishers on the shop floor.

If you fancy adding a bit more pizazz to your Google calendar, you can now add your favourite events from a selected list.

The Official Google blog tells us : “Don’t you think that calendars should be more than lists of appointments and meetings? Well, we think an online calendar should be filled with what interests you most, which is why we just unveiled the Google Calendar gallery. Those of you with Google accounts and your friends (who might not have one) can create, share and save your favorite upcoming events directly in Google Calendar. Now you can find all sorts of interesting schedules to add to yours, like these:

Atlantic Records - See your favorite musical artist’s concert schedules.
Cordless Records - Find out where the latest independent artists are playing.
TLC - Keep up to date on new shows on the TLC Channel.
Disney - Plan your family vacation around special events at Disneyland.
Eventful - Track fun events in your local area.
Jambase - Know which live music acts are coming to your area.
NBA - Follow your favorite basketball team, and never miss a game.
Netflix - Find out when your favorite new movies are available on DVD.
Orbitz Deals - See special travel deals next to your personal calendar.
Wcities - Learn about cool happenings in cities across North America.
Zvents - Gather ideas for things to do this weekend.

Take a look for yourself.

Jason Calacanis has launched Mahalo, a search engine with human intervention. It’s still in alpha so we must wait awhile before testing it properly.

The press release FAQ asks if Mahalo is seen as a threat to Google :

“Is this a Google killer? Nothing is going to ‘kill’ Google in my estimation. Google has an amazing search product and the world’s most efficient advertising infrastructure. We plan on partnering with Google for these services just like I did at Weblogs, Inc., AOL and Netscape. That being said, head-to-head Mahalo’s human-powered search results will be much better than Google’s machine-created results—when we do have a result. My feeling is that ultimately people will use Mahalo for popular search terms, and machine-based search engines like Google and Yahoo! for long-tail searches. ”

I searched for Syntagma and yes, it was in there. We came 2nd and 3rd on the list, below Syntagma Square, Athens, but above all the other companies called Syntagma.

What then is the idea behind the human operators? This is from the press release :

Are humans better than machines at creating search results?

Yes and no. Humans cannot possibly create as many search results as machines, nor can they go as deep on each search result. However, humans using machines can create much better search results than machines alone. Our “Guides” use Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN, Flickr, Delicious, and dozens of other services to hand-craft the cleanest, most organized, and spam-free SeRPs available today.

How much time do you spend building a SeRP? It takes a couple of hours to create a solid search result. However, these results need to be maintained by our Guides on an ongoing basis.

This is an interesting concept and it will be good to watch it mature. Try it out for yourself.