Bing Tries to be too Thoughtful for Google
Have you ever wondered how it is that when you try to look up the weather on the Internet, all the brand-name weather sites just can’t agree on what the weather is going to be like. Well, Microsoft certainly has noticed this, and is trying to win some points trying to smooth this over for for you. When you search on Bing for the weather in your local area, we will certainly get your usual list of major weather forecast websites; but if you venture further, you can find an automatic Bing Compare laid out for you of what all the other websites say. And to help you decide which website you prefer for your forecast, Bing will even write up a journal for you of what the weather has been like over a period of time. Additionally, Bing will also match up the forecast against what really happened, and over the course of a month or two, to give you recommendations on which forecast service is best to choose.Certainly these are improvements, but most interesting about them is the fact that it gives us some clues as to how Bing is trying to outdo Google. Take the innovation at Bing that they call entity cards. Searching on subjects like celebrities, travel destinations, or disease
symptoms, little “entity card” boxes pop up with what Bing considers to be useful asides. If there are a lot of people around the world searching for the same thing, say the city of Paris, Bing will reckon that it must be some event in Paris, and try to offer a hotel and travel information, and listings of important events in those entity boxes. Or if you are looking for information on a pop music personality, Bing will fill those boxes with tour dates and ticket availability information.All the major search engines have great integration with the important social networks; but Bing is looking for ways to take it higher. In Twitter, Microsoft allows you to sort tweets by celebrity, and look up the busiest Twitter celebs first. Bing’s Facebook plan is to lay your friends out on a grid and allow you to choose among the most active ones in lots of convenient ways. Bing isn’t about real revolution yet; it is about thoughtfulness, trying to think like the user, and plying them with lots of delightful little cosmetic touches. This seems to be working, in an age of short attention spans. We’ll get to see if it is a Google beater, not long from now.
Might Twitter have Peaked Already?
Most of what made the news about social media last year, certainly makes it in general, to appear unstoppable; specific reporting about Twitter in particular couldn’t find enough good things to say about the social networking major. Twitter seemed to have its game plan completely figured out – about 60 million registered users, real-time search deals with Google and Bing, and an overzealous crowd of app developers. You would think that a company that was at the very the the zenith of social media success, would find it hard to be written off, but a CNN report does just that.According to the report, Twitter hasn’t seen a major rise in its membership in six months; in fact, towards the end of the year, monthly visitors actually fell on the Twitter site. Of course, Twitter is countering this, saying that all the company lost were the casual users. The true loyalists, have been visiting Twitter in an alarmingly dedicated fashion, they contend. And of course, there is the old stand by – to use Twitter, you don’t have to visit the site; you can use any number of other embedded services. In fact, it has been estimated 70% of the Twitter membership, access its feeds through embedded specialized services. Twitter has declared that it wishes to regain the custom of users back on the home site, away from alternative ways.
But it cannot be denied, that Twitter has become so large now, that the fun, and intimate feel that it was well-loved for to begin with, is now, just not there. This might suffer further still,, when Twitter begins to try to serve advertising on posts in tweets. Twitter is barely 2 years old now; this young, and certainly inexperienced company will have teething problems, and it would be silly to write it off just yet. But expert users still insist today on saying, that there is something missing in Twitter these days – something that simply wasn’t felt, in its glory days. This coming year should have important lessons for all in how the social media, really works.
Google is too Big for the Internet
An important part of the success formula at Google involves finding ever larger areas to record, and finding ever deeper access to websites, to index. But the itinerant Google indexer, whichever direction it heads, often these days, finds itself is timed by foreign government regulation. The biggest news in this area that we’ve seen recently, comes from the China-Google conflict. China wants all search engines operating within the country, to not display any results about the 1989 Tiananmen Square conflict or Tibet. Google did used to go along; but this kind of cooperation can’t be taken for granted anymore, now that China has been found out hacking into Google and causing actual damage.Another kind of wall that keeps Google out is one of the copyright variety. Google’s venture, to try to digitize every university library in the world, has been vigorously opposed by authors and publishers. Google has had to work out an understanding with the publishers. It’s only the orphaned old works that Google has been left alone on. But if the barriers keep Google out of some places, and deprived it of ever more material to index, Google does wonder, if it can foster the creation of new content, just to be able to index it.
Large parts of the world remain alienated from the Internet because of poverty and a lack of education; Google is holding a Wikipedia contest in Tanzania to get locals to translate the free online encyclopedia into their native Swahili. They are giving out laptops and networking equipment to the winners; so far, there have been about 900 articles translated. Google even believes that its search algorithms have reached an important stage in their evolution, and that the company needs to find a new direction – somewhere other than search algorithm tweaking, in which to grow. But even translating the Wikipedia is not problem-free. The original authors of the articles they translate, are now coming out to sue for copyright infringement.
Is Facebook Bigger than even Google?
We’ve often heard, that Google and Facebook are seen to be in direct competition. Unless the “direct competition” spoken of refers to the mindspace occupied by the companies, people often wonder how a search company can be in competition with a social media company. But if you think about it, this isn’t really difficult to conceive of.
facebook
It would be difficult for the provider of any online information or service, to top a search engine in user traffic: search engines are our first port of call when we open a browser. For the first time though, social networking sites are pulling in more visitors, then even the search engines. Once an Internet portal has an irresistible product, it brings power that allows it to change the very way the Internet is run. For instance, YouTube has achieved a certain critical mass of videos on such a variety of subjects, and that there are a good number of young people who feel no need to search on Google to read about anything. They just search on YouTube, for a video on the subject they are interested in. In fact, YouTube is now the second largest search engine after Google.
So what happens if the social media sites become so enormously popular, that even search begins to take second place? To begin with, people would be subscribing to updates on Twitter and Facebook, more than RSS ever succeeded in getting us to do. Perhaps the very concept of the browser would be threatened. And just as free access to all the newspapers of the world is driving publishers of physical books and papers to bankruptcy, and throwing up protests of how quality in publishing will suffer, free access to information on people’s Facebook and Twitter feeds, would perhaps send up another wave of protests that there will be no way of determining quality, if people begin to look directly to sharing with Internet friends, as a way to gain basic knowledge. Such a fundamental game changer, would shake up the established business plan that Google controls now.
Google New Social Networking Attempt – An Appropriately-Named Google Buzz
Google has always been interested in social networking; Orkut was one of the first successful social networking portals out there, and Google snapped it up. Orkut never really quite made it past niche markets in India and Brazil though. But Google still had its core search business that had never been stronger. But in a world where it is beginning to emerge that social networking like Facebook can in some cases overtake basic search in raw Internet usage share, and a world where people prefer the links they come by on their social networking forages over searching for things themselves, Google has been taking a good hard look at gaining a presence here for itself – as a way of hedging against future eventualities. Last Tuesday, Google finally came through on its social networking promise, with Google Buzz; a way that lets Gmail account holders pass around photos, videos, and general updates.Google Buzz is going to be an added feature on Gmail, and not an independent service. This gets it started on an excellent user base right on its first day. All of Gmail’s 176 million users, will automatically find themselves on Buzz, and their friends circle on Buzz will be their most frequently e-mails contacts. So what does someone do on Buzz? The same thing as any other standard Facebook clone – users post their status, they post their pictures from Picasa, their videos from YouTube, and of course, messages from Twitter. If you look at it, Buzz seems to look like it got a lot of inspiration from Facebook; and the real Facebook, certainly has a lot to worry about now.
Trying to out-Facebook Facebook may not really work at this stage though; Facebook has had a six-year headstart, and has 400 million users. How much banality can people share at one time? But Google actually feels that overloading people with banal information is the way it can become relevant. Google’s search and relevancy algorithms, they feel, are going to make Buzz so easy to use in a time when people have a superfluity of information to sift through; Google’s powerful search filters can pick the needle of interest out of the haystack of irrelevance so well that people will want to leave Facebook behind.
Facebook is trying to step into Google’s home turf too for its part – into instant messaging. Facebook plans to use the Jabber protocol to allow other instant message services, to integrate with Facebook’s own. AOL’s AIM will be the first. AIM users will log into Facebook right through their familiar AIM environment, and directly find out about which Facebook friends are available to message to. Facebook’s game, it is clear, is no longer to just be a website that people go to mess with friends on. They want to be Internet infrastructure; they want to be the behind-the scenes social networking foundation people end up using whenever they need to get in touch with their friends, no matter what website they go to.
Google’s Public DNS – Is Google Doing this for a Reason or are They just being Nice?
Google has gone public with its plans for Google Public DNS, a service that will let people take on Google as their DNS provider, for reasons of what is claimed to be a better, faster and more reliable Internet experience. And Google gets a lot more data to sift through for its search research, though Google denies this. How does all of this work though? Basically, DNS is like a telephone exchange for all of the Internet. A user-friendly web address like in Google.com, is really a disguise for the user unfriendly numeric IP address underneath. The DNS service is what does the translating from the memorable website name, to the unmemorable number. Usually, it is a server, a free service like OpenDNS, that performs the service.
To implement Google’s public DNS, you can find the relevant instructions on their DNS page. But there are a few points one would do well to keep in consideration. If you use a router for your connection you need to change the DNS entry over there, and not on the PC as you normally would. That will ensure that all the computers that connect to the Internet through the router will automatically stand reconfigured. Google’s Public DNS does not play nice with Internet Protocol Version 6; and it can disable Outlook. It would be best to do your test run, on a noncritical network.
So what is it like to actually use it? When you type in a URL the wrong way, on a normal DNS server, usually, you are just redirected to some landing page full of one-liner advertisements that the ISP likes to give you. One of the benefits to using Google Public DNS is that this never happens. You only get an error message. But to make this happen, you need to have configured the DNS on the router, not the PC. Using Google Public DNS isn’t that faster, in no way that would make a difference. You could save a second in the time it takes to load a page if you’re lucky, but that is all.
What does Google gain from all of this? It could be that Google wishes to be alerted to which websites in the world are hot at the moment, in real time. Right now, unless people are searching through Google, they would have no way of knowing. If people are using Google’s public DNS, everything would get routed through Google, and they would know. Researching search is their business.
Ganging up on Google
We have been hearing for quite a while now that printed newspapers are dinosaurs of the past; that people find it much easier to cherry pick their favorite news stories with Google or an RSS feed, and newspaper companies are going out business everywhere. But it isn’t just the printed newspaper that feels threatened by the Internet; online news services like MSN and Fox News are beginning to feel it too. This has been at the center of an extraordinary development; all news content publishers want to boycott Google.
It all started with News Corp., the world’s largest media conglomerate, getting annoyed with Google for indexing all of its news stories on its search engine results, and providing a short extract. The fear is that people have learned to search for news stories on Google instead of on the news sites themselves. Google search results and Google News are turning into a mega news outlet themselves without ever having gathered a shred of news themselves. News Corp., which owns publications like the Wall Street Journal,has a two-step program in place. First it will ask Google to stop indexing any of its publications the world over. Once that is done, it will move to turn all of its news outlets into pay sites. But news Corp. is not confident that it could pull off something like this; it is looking for allies.
News Corp. has invited other major news companies to join it in its boycott; and surprisingly, it has responses. MSNBC and many regional newspapers in the US have joined hands with News Corp., in asking Google to stop featuring their news articles on its websites. Google has taken notice of these developments and promises to play nice. From now on, if any news service wants Google to stop indexing it, they will just need to make a little modification to their HTML code. News Corp will end up losing readership, but they need to give it a try, don’t they?
Google’s Web Philosophies – Facebook’s a Fan?
Google Labs today has about 30 applications to test on the world to judge suitability for release.Google Labs is the company’s crucible for hot experimental ideas to test, in-house and on volunteers among the user base. The test is not only for smooth reliable operation, but also for the likelihood of acceptance among users. Google knows from the way innovations on Facebook and Microsoft Office have been released before , that there many ideas that application designers put out, that are simply rejected by the public for a variety of reasons: they could be too fussy, they could just be unlikable, and so on. Plenty of Google Labs ideas exist that haven’t quite made the cut yet even if they do happen to be very popular. Undo Send, and Off-line Gmail, being the best examples. The real-world test of whether a product will actually be used often enough to warrant release, is Labs’ final aim. Mozilla does Labs one better: the new functions and applications do not even need to be designed in-house. Contributors outside the company can always take matters into their own hands.
Now Facebook is taking a page out of Google Labs’ copybook. Facebook recently announced a new service called Prototypes where add-ons and features made in-house can be given a test drive. Two months after its launch, there are six applications out for test. One is a tool that lets you search for posts that are close in character to posts you like, one is a photo tag search, and so on. This is a fundamental shift for Facebook; it was company policy up until recently to not rope in anyone other than professional product testers to kick the tyres on new applications. What could be more social then than to be welcome everyone in to shape a social networking service .
Facebook itself, states that it wants to use Prototypes as a window into how the average Facebook fan thinks. Games have proved to be the most popular add-on on Facebook. Soon, everyone could be customizing their home pages on Facebook with all kinds of attractive and useful applications. To build a profile of the average Facebook user by studying long-term behavior, should be a useful lesson indeed on basic human behavior.
Chrome Frame: Injecting New Life into Internet Explorer
Most ordinary folk get by on the computer with a few seat-of-the-pants skills. When you don’t really know the difference between an operating system, a browser, a search engine and “The Internets”though, the first sign of a complication could spell trouble. Google estimates that more than half of all computer users have no idea what a browser is, and what kind it is they use. This is a big problem for Google; how are they to get people to upgrade their old IE5 and IE6 browsers to the latest versions that are capable of running the best new Google applications like Gmail and Google Maps, and more importantly, Google Wave , when users don’t even know what a browser is?
The answer is a version of Google Chrome, a browser that has been out for more than a year now, and has seen no more than 3% in market acceptance. People may not aware of what a browser is, they all certainly know what a plug-in is, thanks to Adobe Flash, a plug-in that has achieved a 97% installed base on computers worldwide. Google’s idea in converting the vast numbers of browser upgrade holdouts is, to present their new browser Google Chrome not as a total browser they will need to upgrade to, but as a plug-in for their antique beat-up Internet Explorers.
The thing that will achieve this, is Chrome Frame. Google is working with web developers around the world who are similarly frustrated with the resistance people have to upgrades. From now on, anytime a Web user looks up a page that has complex JavaScript and HTML tag needs that an old Internet Explorer can’t handle, the webpage will serve up a pop-up that will ask the user if they would like to install a Chrome Frame plug-in to better display the page with. When the user clicks Yes, the pop-up will proceed to delete the old Internet Explorer’s coding on the computer, and replace it with brand new Google Chrome innards. It will still look like the old Internet Explorer, but it will function like the brand-new Chrome.
Google Wave is a particularly demanding Web application; it is supposed to work off the Internet, but work with the responsiveness of a desktop installation. This just would not happen with an older browser; and it makes it very important that a way be found to get everyone to upgrade. Google doesn’t actually profit from Chrome; donating its function to someone else’s name really doesn’t hurt Google.
What is it Really that People do with Google’s Wave
When e-mail first appeared on the scene, everyone knew right away what they wanted done with it. Google’s Wave has been around for about six months now; we may know of some obscure collaborative use we personally have for it, but an idea of the typical mainstream use of it still eludes us.Google Wave is a place that allows you to share documents with other people, work on them all together, and do so with real-time instant e-mail and instant messaging. High-level research students have found a good tool in Wave finding collaborators and critics for their work around the world. Topic initiators set up a Wave to take something up, a-la Google Docs. Collaborators and other interested parties from around the world can join the discussion and post their observations and notes, in real-time. For note-taking, Wave provides options for groups within the Wave discussion: extra-curricular groups, rotating in-class groups and so on.
One application is used to take the place of several discrete ones. Applications like Google Docs can easily bring a number of people together to collaborate in real time developing and debating an idea using real-time chat and e-mail; frequently a collaborator might need to trace a line of discussion to its beginning: with a Rewind function.
Unlike how it would be in a real group, a virtual group like this allows anyone who wishes to slack off to do so without ever having anyone else know about it. There is no inherent check and balance system you’d find in a virtual group that can expose the absence of a contribution from slackers. Google Wave can be a wonderful tool: for those who are self-motivated. As with other examples of modern technology, a person who needs a group to march in step with will have a measure of trouble keeping accountable.
Related Posts from the Past:
Categories
- Agriya Events (6)
- Agriya Ideas (3)
- Agriya News (102)
- Anova (11)
- Burrow (5)
- BuySell (3)
- Channel (6)
- Client Interviews (1)
- Computer Security (7)
- Crowdsourcing (1)
- Developers (2)
- Extensions (1)
- Feedy (1)
- FP Platform (9)
- GroupDeal (9)
- GroupWithUs (1)
- Holidays (1)
- internet (16)
- Internet News (57)
- iSocial (8)
- latest technology (21)
- Life @ Agriya (1)
- online marketing (15)
- PartyPlanet (1)
- search engines (8)
- SEO Game (18)
- SF Platform (1)
- Social Media News (17)
- social networking (43)
- Volume (3)
- Web 2.0 (8)
- web design (6)
- Webmaster Articles (113)
Archives
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
Page optimized by WP Minify WordPress Plugin