Bing vs. Google face-off, round 2
The way we left things yesterday, we gave Microsoft's newly revamped Bing search engine some moderately tough, everyday search tests, and gave Google the same treatment. After three heats, the score thus far is Bing 2, Google 1, with Bing performing quite admirably in the computer parts shopping department.
Search engines are fairly good for finding something you know you're searching for. In the real world, folks don't often know what or who it is they're searching for, which is why they're searching for him. So suppose someone sends you out on the Internet to find...
Bing vs. Google face-off, round 1
Easily the biggest single change to the way I do business over the past quarter-century -- bigger than the ubiquitousness of e-mail, bigger than the mouse, bigger than push-button piracy -- is the search engine. Google is an invaluable research tool that my colleagues and I might have invested literally thousands in to be able to use, were it available two decades ago; though in all fairness, the search engine that truly blazed the trail in functionality in the early days of the Web was AltaVista.
Even AltaVista has some unique linguistic tricks that, if they could be applied to Google's colossal index, would yield mind-boggling results; so the notion that Google cannot be bested is probably false. But this time it's Microsoft once again that's laying down the gauntlet. This time, its search engine's latest revamp sheds what some had seen as its biggest liability: its brand name's ties to Windows, as if using Windows Live Search had anything to do with using Windows. The choice of Bing as the final title indicates that most of the good dot-com names really have already been taken; but that criticism aside, Bing deserves a fair shake.
Loving the octothorpe; or, why Twitter's hashtags really do reflect reality
This episode of Recovery is brought to you by the Three Wolf Shirt and the newly leaked Palm Pre default ringtone. If one doesn't leave you awash in win, the other will. Both together, however, will probably cause your puny mortal frame to go supernova, so knock that off.
The new social-media doyenne at The New York Times is dutifully twittering away, asking the community to send suggestions about how the paper could better use the resources available. (Unlike the rest of us, the folks at the Times would't do anything so undignified as learning by doing. They also find proper sourcing a bit beneath them, but we'll save that conversation for another day.) She's getting a mixed bag of responses, of course, but one from @rkellett stands out for me: "Get the NYT to standardize, push, create hashtags on breaking news."
Google's move to introduce a Wave of synchronicity
It's not unusual to see something emerging from Google's laboratories that folks in the general press fail to understand, and the company's marketing is partly to blame there. The public introduction during this morning's I/O Developers' conference of a Web programming construct called Google Wave generated headlines ranging in scope from a new competitor for Microsoft SharePoint, to a next generation social network, to a series of browser extensions for Chrome to rival the Mozilla Jetpack project, and finally to the company's evil plan to conquer and corrupt HTML 5.
Excluding the latter, it could very well be all of these items. Essentially, Wave is an architecture, and not really a very new one. It's an old solution to a very old problem: that of synchronicity in distributed applications. As database architects know better than anyone, the problem with maintaining a distributed database is that multiple users may make changes that conflict with each other, leading to disparity and multiple versions. Currently, transactional modeling solves that problem, but a more direct and simpler approach from a mathematical standpoint would be simply to translate every operation, or every change a user requests to a database -- every command from client to server -- into a figurative mathematical language so that the terms of the command take into account the changes simultaneously being ordered by all the others.
Microsoft re-invents itself in search with Bing
Today, Microsoft officially unleashed Bing upon the world. It's a brand that will be associated with intelligent search, and is hence classified as a "Decision Engine," rather than a search engine. Rollout of the new service (to be located at www.bing.com) begins over the next few days and will be completed in under a week, with the target deployment date of June third.
Click the Bing logo for slideshow.
Meet Bing: Microsoft's new search engine in pictures
Microsoft on Thursday took the wraps off its new Google competitor, a revamped Live Search dubbed "Bing." The site focuses on answering queries without requiring the user to leave the search page. But will it be enough to enable Microsoft to start taking back some search share from Google? Bing officially launches June 3, but we've put together a slideshow to give you a taste of what's to come.
Adobe brings its own PowerPoint-style app to the cloud
Acrobat.com Presentations offers way to create simple Flash-based slideshow presentations online which can be worked on by numerous Adobe.com members simultaneously and then be presented from their online location or exported as .PDF files for offline use.
The app's interface is similar to Adobe's Web-based Photoshop Express, and provides a comparable level of functionality: basic, but elegant and aesthetically pleasing. While the same Adobe user ID can be used to access both Presentations and Photoshop Express, the two applications are actually separate branches of Adobe's growing arsenal of Web-based services.
To Bing or not to Bing?
Focusing on Microsoft's dilemma over how it can compete against Google in a market that Google now solidly owns, blinds one to the bigger problem facing anyone trying to do business on the Internet today, including Microsoft: No one really has a clue as to how the damned thing works.
Arguably, Google may be closer to discovering the clue than anyone. But its clever marketing tactics, which lead the technology press to cover color changes to the Gmail toolbar and the shifting of department names from the bottom to the right side of the corporate logo as strike-up-the-band events, indicate to me that Google is just as indecisive about a viable long-term business plan as everyone else. It's just better at masking that fact.
Microsoft unveils Windows Media Center support for your Netflix queue
Users of Windows Media Center just got a big boost in the variety of content available through their preferred media manager, as Microsoft announced on Wednesday that the Vista Home Premium and Ultimate users who are also Netflix unlimited members have access to over 12,000 movies and TV shows via WMC, effective immediately (give or take a couple of days).
The arrangement dramatically ups the appeal of WMC, especially for those users who don't feel the need to throw a TV tuner into their PC -- or, for that matter, to sign up for Netflix's Instantly To Your TV service.
New iteration of Flock browser bolsters Twitter, multi-service support
Of all the specialized browsers out there, Flock is perhaps the one best suited to the social-networking scene, with support for a constellation of services such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and so on. To date it's been a nice way of keeping an eye on one's daily flood of information, but serious interaction required that you pop open a browser window. (Such a burden.)
You might find you never need to do so again with the 2.5 version, just released for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Those who closely follow streams from highly prolific twitterbugs may need to go to the main browser window from time to time, but for most purposes, the Twitter reader in Flock rises to the level of the very best standalone readers. (And their new non-Twitter toys aren't so shabby either.)
Napster: What you should know before plunking down five dollars
There's no doubt that five dollars a month for a music subscription is about as dirt cheap as you can get, so Napster is right on when it comes to attractive pricing. Five dollars for five DRM-free MP3s and unlimited streaming of Napster's catalog per month is a price seated squarely on the "why not?" point.
But this is the point where you have to be wary, because you could end up buying more of what you already have.
Imagine, a 'Firefox 4' without browser tabs
Insofar as Web applications have become a fact of many everyday users' lives and work, the Web browser has come to fulfill the role of a de facto operating system -- which is why browser performance is a more important topic now than ever before. Now, this most important class of application could be at a turning point in its evolution, a point where history appears to repeat itself once again.
During the era between Windows 2.0 and 3.1, a minimized window was an icon that resided in the area we now consider the "Desktop;" and even today, many Windows users' Desktops don't perform the same role as the Mac Desktop that catalyzed Windows' creation. Even Windows 7 has tweaked the concept of what a minimized window does and means; and in the Web browser context, a tab represents a similar type of functionality, giving users access to pages that aren't currently displayed.
The technologists' (read: 'geeks') guide to the weekend
There are many bold and beautiful aspects to geekdom, but weekends aren't one of them. Many of us -- most of us -- lay aside our workplace tech tasks and go home to our friends and families and their computer travails. Or we head for movies that send us into paroxysms of fact-checking angst ("As if they'd have given the explosive charges to only Olson and not Kirk or Sulu as well -- worst logistics ever!"). Or we dig into an open-source project or a volunteer effort that looks just like our work taskload. Or we don't take the weekend at all.
And geeks, that's okay. Know who you are and what makes you happy. The secret to geek happiness isn't getting away from it all; it's being able to survey it all from your chosen perch. Which happens to be made of ones and zeros and silicon and DIY and logic and fierce intelligence.
April showers bring May comScore numbers
Here's food for thought: Twitter isn't just more popular than professional wrestling, though that's something of a shock. It's more popular than baseball. Seems un-American, doesn't it.
It's more popular than MLB.com, anyway; the April comScore numbers are out, and the microblogging service is the 56th most popular site around (as far as unique visitors go), compared to MLB.com's 87th-place ranking. But all three sites are, along with the 236th-ranked stompin' matches World Wrestling Entertainment site, among the top-gaining properties as measured by the Reston, Va.-based ratings service.
Nokia's file sharing site gets de-prioritized
Nokia's Ovi Share has been put into stasis. Ovi Share was built from Redmond startup Twango which Nokia purchased in 2007. As a part of its online services restructuring that the company announced in late April, Ovi Share will continue to exist, but with a considerably dimmer future.
A Nokia representative was quoted by Reuters today as saying the service is just "planned to be maintained in its current state," with no further investments being put toward development as the company restructures its services department.
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