MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Tonight at Campfire One at the Googleplex (http://code.google.com/campfire/), Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) will announce a preview release of Google Friend Connect, a service that helps website owners grow traffic by enabling any site on the web to easily provide social features for its visitors.
Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social -- and now they can be, easily. With Google Friend Connect (see http://www.google.com/friendconnect following this evening's Campfire One), any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running immediately without programming -- picking and choosing from built-in functionality like user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.
Visitors to any site using Google Friend Connect will be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends, or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web, including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more.
To illustrate, independent musician Ingrid Michaelson has added music features from iLike with Google Friend Connect and is now able to run the iLike OpenSocial application on her official website (www.ingridmichaelson.com). As a result, starting tonight, fans who visit Ingrid's site can connect with their friends without having to leave the site. Visitors will be able to see comments by friends from their social networks, add music to their profiles, see who is attending concerts, and enjoy other features of the iLike application, all at Ingrid's website. With Google Friend Connect, people will be able to enjoy their favorite features with their friends on any website across the web.
"We want to bring ourselves to every eyeball, not bring every eyeball to us," said Hadi Partovi, President of iLike. "Friend Connect is a significant opportunity for iLike, artists, and fans. The iLike Artist Dashboard™ will be the first content-management system that allows artists not only to post their songs, concerts, and videos to every leading social network from one dashboard, but also to simultaneously manage the content on their own websites."
Google Friend Connect has been developed to lower two barriers to the spread of social features across the web. First, many website owners want to add features that enable their visitors to do things with their friends, but the technology and resource hurdles have been too high. Second, people are tiring of needing to create new logins and profiles and recreate their friends lists wherever they go on the web. Google Friend Connect offers a solution to both these issues.
"Google Friend Connect is about helping the 'long tail' of sites become more social," said David Glazer, a director of engineering at Google. "Many sites aren't explicitly social and don't necessarily want to be social networks, but they still benefit from letting their visitors interact with each other. That used to be hard. Fortunately, there's an emerging wave of social standards -- OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and the data access APIs published by Facebook, Google, MySpace, and others. Google Friend Connect builds on these standards to let people easily connect with their friends, wherever they are on the web, making 'any app, any site, any friends' a reality."
For Site Owners: Traffic and User Engagement
Without requiring coding experience, Google Friend Connect gives site owners a way to attract and engage more people by giving visitors a way to connect with friends on their websites.
Drive traffic: people who discover interesting sites can bring their friends with them, and can opt-in to publish their activities on those sites back into their social network, attracting even more visitors.
Increase engagement: access to friends and OpenSocial applications provides more interesting content and richer social experiences.
Less work: any site can have social components without hiring a programming team or becoming a social network.
Google Friend Connect is in a preview release, available tonight after Campfire One on a handful of whitelisted websites. All site owners interested in learning more about Google Friend Connect and signing up for the wait list can visit http://www.google.com/friendconnect/ starting tonight. In the weeks ahead we will be turning on more sites, adding more social applications, and integrating feedback from site owners and developers.
Google I/O
Learn more about Google Friend Connect, OpenSocial, and other social initiatives at Google I/O, a two-day developer gathering about building the next generation of web applications. It takes place May 28-29 at Moscone West, San Francisco. Register now for Google I/O at http://code.google.com/events/io/.
Conference Call Information
Google will host a conference call to discuss this announcement. The conference call will be held on Monday, May 12, 2008 at 9:30 a.m. Pacific Time (12:30 p.m. Eastern Time). To access the conference call, please dial +1 (800) 776-0087 within the United States and +1 (913) 312-1509 from international locations. Replays of both calls will be available until midnight Eastern Time, May 19, 2008 at +1 (888) 203-1112 domestically and +1 (719) 457-0820 internationally. The confirmation code for the replay of the call is 7571843.
About Google Inc.
Google's innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets. Google's targeted advertising program provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall web experience for users. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia. For more information, visit www.google.com.
Contacts
Google
Sean Carlson, +1 650 253 1173
seanc@google.com
Monday, May 12, 2008
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Technique could apply to different parts of human body
Cross-section and close-up of a rabbit trachea whose inner lining has been damaged. The injuries here were treated by adding engineered tracheal cells.
MIT researchers find novel way to repair airway injuries
MIT tissue engineers have successfully healed airway injuries in rabbits using a technique they believe could apply to the trachea and other parts of the human body.
The work, published in the advance online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of May 5, expands researchers' understanding of the control of tissue repair and could lead to new treatments for tracheal injuries, such as smoke inhalation and damage from long-term intubation.
The new technique heals airway injuries by placing new tracheal cells around the injury site. Two types of tracheal cells, embedded within a three-dimensional gelatin scaffold, take over the functions of the damaged tissue.
"We can begin to replicate the regulatory role cells play within tissues by creating engineered constructs with more than one cell type," said Elazer Edelman, the Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and senior author of the paper.
Patents on the technique have been licensed to Pervasis, a company co-founded by Edelman, which develops cell-based therapies that induce repair and regeneration in a wide array of tissues.
The trachea and other respiratory tubes, like most tubes in the body, have an intricate, three-layer architecture. The inner layer, or epithelium, interacts with whatever is flowing through the tube; in the case of the trachea, air. The middle layer is composed of muscle that constricts or relaxes the tube, and the outer layer consists of connective tissue that supports microvessels and small nerves.
Most attempts at tissue regeneration seek to rebuild this complex architecture with structural precision.
However, the MIT researchers found that it is not necessary to recapture the ordered layering to heal injuries. Instead, they concentrated on restoring cellular health. When cells are intact and have regained their biological function, they need only reside near the injured tissue to enhance overall repair.
Edelman and colleagues achieved this repair state by delivering a mixture of new healthy cells derived from the epithelial lining and the nourishing blood vessels. The combination of epithelial and endothelial cells take over the biochemical role lost with cell damage. The healthy cells release growth factors and other molecules necessary for healing tissue, and can modulate their delivery in response to physiological feedback control signals.
"Cells are not just an array of bricks surrounded by mortar, nor are they passive drug pumps. Cells are active elements that respond to the dynamic changes of their environment with modulated secretion of critical factors. They don't need to be stacked in one specific fashion to function, but they do need to be healthy and near the injured tissue," said Edelman, who is also a professor at Harvard Medical School and cardiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital.
To get the best results, both epithelial and endothelial cells must be replaced in the injured airway. "One cell type can't do it alone. With this complex disease, each regulatory cell offers something unique and together they optimize repair," Edelman said.
The cells must also be grown within a 3D scaffold, otherwise, the two types of cells will stay segregated and will not work as effectively.
Because of the similarities between the trachea and other tubes in the body, such as those of the vascular, genitourinary and gastrointestinal systems, the researchers believe their approach could translate to other organs.
"We can apply this same approach to so many different parts of the body," said Brett Zani, a postdoctoral associate in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and lead author of the paper.
Other authors are Koji Kojima and Charles Vacanti of the Laboratory of Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital.
The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health.
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