Facebook users share 'Everything,' including how sorry their lives are
Social networking site Facebook has more than 350 million active users, and more than 35 million users update their "status" every day. They could be updated with personal information, music, videos, links, or anything that users feel the need to share with their social group.
During 2009, nearly 13 billion of these status updates were posted, and Facebook has released its "Top Status trends of 2009," indicating just what was on people's minds.
Live Poll: Should Facebook give you your privacy?
Now that Facebook has altered its privacy policy for users, what statement best reflects your personal stance on social networks' privacy policy?(polls)
Last week's change to Facebook's privacy policy resulted in tens of thousands of users being directly confronted with a choice over how Facebook should change its stance. The initial result was confusion, but as folks worked out what the question really meant, they came to a discovery that they were not only being asked, but encouraged, to turn off their privacy settings altogether as a benefit to "Everyone" -- Facebook's new default class.
Now, the group that helped focus the US Federal Trade Commission's attention on Google has turned its sights on Facebook, initiating a complaint action yesterday that could lead to a federal investigation of the subject. Expect Congress to follow suit at some point, perhaps calling Facebook executives to the witness stand. In advance of the coming debate, where do you stand on the subject? That's Betanews Live Poll for this Friday.
Glide OS launches Internet Explorer plugin, BlackBerry app
With all the recent attention given to Google's Chrome OS, it is only natural that interest in other cloud-based environments should be higher than usual. However, interest in Webtop operating systems still remains relatively low.
Earlier this year, Ray Valdes of Gartner Research said, "From a long-term perspective, I don't see any change to current market trends, which are that Webtop ventures are not gaining market traction."
Bing continues to grow, staking its claim in mobile search
Microsoft's six-month old search engine Bing has been performing admirably, says market research firm comScore, and it grew to a 10.3% share of the search market in November.
During the month of November, core US search volume grew by 17.8%, but only Google's and Microsoft's sites increased in share. Yahoo, Ask, and AOL, on the other hand, all declined.
Google URL shortening not ready for prime time in Firefox
Download Google Toolbar for Firefox version 7.0.2009.1214Wb1 from Fileforum now.
You know the global domain name system is not the perfect solution for today's modern Internet when an entire cottage industry evolves around masking it, removing the dot-com and making URLs more portable. TinyURL.com helped pioneer that market years ago, but since that time, bit.ly has become the official shortening service of Twitter, where small URLs are the most precious commodity. Competitor tr.im still struggles to compete there, as its trimmed URLs are automatically replaced with substitutes from preferred partner bit.ly.
iTunes gets cloudy: Will a web-ified future save iTunes or kill it?
I'm not at all surprised that Apple's recent purchase of Lala Media, a previously-ignored music streaming outfit that likely would have flatlined otherwise, is already generating rumblings of impending major change to one of the most pivotal brands in its arsenal. While it was the iPod and iPhone devices that first established Apple's consumer product cred and later sealed its long-term position on the techno-cultural podium, it was iTunes that turned the process of buying, managing and consuming content from a chaotic mess into something that ultimately killed the local record store and permanently changed the entertainment landscape.
If only the world never changed
In a peace offering to newspapers, Google offers a new news format
Exactly what online news should be or become is a subject that consumed the "blue sky" discussions among publishers since the late 1990s. Despite every concept they've ever created, tried or untried, what publishers typically end up with is either something that looks segmented and departmentalized like CNN.com or NYTimes.com, or is basically a blog whose scroll reveals a history of news, like it was printed on a roll of paper towels.
So the concept that Google Labs began attempting yesterday with its "Living Stories" concept (whose name for some reason brings to mind a certain peacock) is absolutely not new. It's been discussed before, in some fashion or another, and even approved -- for what it's worth. But on a large scale, it's never been done until yesterday: assembling all the stories relating to a pertinent, current topic on a page devoted to the topic, not the publisher and not some permanent department of the publication like "Sports" or "Tech."
Google Maps doesn't prevent car accidents, only search accidents
Those of you who follow my Tweets (@TimConneally) know that I got into a car accident yesterday. Nothing too serious, mind you, just a little unexpected voyage into converging traffic. I was hurriedly trying to obey my Google Maps turn-by-turn directions without noticing that the light I was approaching was actually red.
I'm not speaking against Google Maps navigation at all, but the incident successfully brought one of the application's new features to mind: Report Problems in Maps.
Google rolls out real-time search, Near Me Now, extended personalization
After stirring up privacy concerns with a personalized search announcement, industry search engine leader Google threw a press conference today to launch a slate of other new search offerings for PCs and mobile phones, including a possibly equally controversial feature that integrates Twitter tweets and blog posts with news articles in real-time searches.
Google's announcements also include two new location-based options for iPhones and Droid phones: Near Me Now and Product Search.
Bing bonked by service outage Thursday, Microsoft configured the wrong server
For about 40 minutes starting at approximately 9:30 pm EST Thursday evening, by Betanews estimates, the main page of Microsoft's Bing Web site was inaccessible to users. In its place was a message filled with hexadecimal code, leading off with the message, "This isn't the page you wanted!"
No kidding. But was Bing being hijacked? As Microsoft acknowledged this morning, its own administrators were responsible for the outage.
Survey reveals there are more women than men, including on social networks
This just in: Females outnumber males on social networking sites. The site Pingdom did a survey, and concluded that 16 out of 19 (84%) of the most popular social sites have more women populating them than men. The super geek sites Digg, Reddit, and Slashdot have more men on them, but the more popular sites including Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, all have more women visiting them.
The average ratio of all sites surveyed, according to Pingdom, was 47% male, 53% female.
Online advertising evolves away from display, toward interactive software
Digital advertising is evolving beyond the desktop computer, leaving companies relying solely on Web sites and display advertising woefully behind the eight ball. More and more, brands are relying on software development to create engaging consumer experiences that span multiple open platforms. Branded mobile applications are fast becoming an important element of this new digital ecosystem, as evidenced by Apple's announcement that its App Store had surpassed 100,000 apps in early November.
This shift away from more familiar mediums for brand communication has important implications for the composition of, and interaction between, established groups within agencies. The pervasive dynamic between technology and creative groups is not always conducive to more technically demanding campaigns because of a fundamental disconnect between these two groups' proficiencies.
Google begrudgingly adjusts news crawling for paid publishers
With a group of blog posts this morning, one of which literally said paid content was probably not a good idea anyway, Google announced it was making an adjustment to its First Click Free aggregation scheme for news publishers. The adjustment to the service, first rolled out in 2007, will now enable readers to sample more content before subscribing through the publisher's own portal.
"While we're happy to see that a number of publishers are already using First Click Free, we've found that some who might try it are worried about people abusing the spirit of First Click Free to access almost all of their content," reads this morning's post to Google's Webmaster Central blog. "As most users are generally happy to be able to access just a few pages from these premium content providers, we've decided to allow publishers to limit the number of accesses under the First Click Free policy to five free accesses per user each day."
Microsoft 'worked with Apple' for Silverlight on iPhone, says Goldfarb
It was an impressive demonstration, once they got it working: H.264 video streaming wirelessly (and slowly, at least during the caching sequence) using Microsoft's Silverlight video streaming, to an Apple iPhone. It's all the more impressive when you realize that Flash video still has not made its way (permanently) to the iPhone, not for any technical reasons we know of...simply because Apple wants to control the video channel for streaming media to its devices.
And yet here it is, a Microsoft stream. You'd think Apple would have stood firm against Microsoft at least as aggressively as it has against Adobe, if not more so. How did this happen? We asked Microsoft User Experience Platform Manager Brian Goldfarb last week at PDC 2009, and the answer was a huge surprise...followed by some caveats. But it contained these four amazing words: "We worked with Apple."
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