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Posts Tagged ‘ Google ’

Facebook’s weekly US traffic overtakes Google’s

As if there wasn’t already enough evidence that Facebook is slowly take over the internet, reports emerging this week suggest that for the first time, the amount of weekly traffic heading to Facebook is higher than that of Google in the US.

Posted March 18, 2010 9:17 am by Alex Horner 1 Comment

Filed under: Trends | Tags: ,

Google Buzz arrives, confuses us all slightly

Google Buzz launched yesterday among a fair bit of fanfare in the realm of social media. It’s available immediately to any Gmail users and lets you share status updates, photos, videos and links with your friends or the wider public. So far, so Facebook.  In fact we struggled for a long while to work out exactly how Buzz differed from a very basic version of Facebook. There are several features borrowed from Twitter too – following people and @ replies for example.

Posted February 11, 2010 10:08 am by Alex Horner 0 Comments

Filed under: Social Media | Tags: ,,,,,

Google Latitude helps you stalk your friends

2009’s biggest trend so far: location-based services. Google Labs has unveiled a new addition to Maps that allows users to see where their friends are currently located by plotting them on a map. You can see the location of anyone you know (who has opted into the service, naturally) as well as their current status using your mobile or an iGoogle gadget. So for example, my friend Vladimir might be ‘playing tennis’ and I can see from his location that he’s in a North London tennis club.

Posted February 4, 2009 4:47 pm by Alex Horner 0 Comments

Filed under: Trends | Tags: ,,

Google does a Digg

The founder of Wikipedia talked about doing something similar a while back but the latest addition to Google Labs is a Digg-style rating system for search results. Think the 4th result down is actually the most relevant? Click on the little up arrow next to it and push it up where it belongs (and give it a little orange star in the process). Irrelevant result? Click the cross to banish it from view. Great idea but we’re left wondering how they’ll protect this from viral companies who’ve become so adept at exploiting Digg and other rating systems such as that found on YouTube.

Posted December 3, 2007 6:11 pm by Alex Horner 0 Comments

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: ,

Google knows where you are without GPS

Genius. Watch the video above for an explanation. We’ve just tried it and it’s scarily accurate. Now all we need to do is have a function to keep tabs on other people’s locations too. Those ‘i’m stuck at the station darling’ excuses will soon be a thing of the past.

Posted December 3, 2007 4:23 pm by Alex Horner 0 Comments

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Google’s OpenSocial makes a lot of sense

Google’s soon to launch OpenSocial is a set of APIs designed to let developers easily create applications that will work across any participating social networks. So instead of creating one for MySpace, one for Facebook and so on, a developer will create..well just one. Benefits to the developer: save time and money by using more of your existing code rather than learning new programming langauges (FBML for instance) every time you want to create an app for a specific network. Google are making a very sensible move here. Rather than creating another new social network in an attempt to catch up with MySpace or Facebook (both of whom are unsurprisingly not a part of OpenSocial) they are creating something genuinely useful and a territory they can own within the crowded world of social networks. Initial partners include Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle.

Posted November 1, 2007 11:00 am by Alex Horner 0 Comments

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Google Earth adds a flight simulator

It’s pretty basic at this stage but once we start seeing more people render the world’s architecture in 3d it’s going to get a lot more interesting. That’s the power of the global brain, people! * Rants accepts no responsibility for the appalling song accompanying the above video.

Posted September 3, 2007 8:32 am by Alex Horner 1 Comment

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Google’s innovation plans

A couple of videos from the Googleplex. The first one is a presentation by Google CIO Douglas Merrill on Innovation at Google. The second one is a lecture from Vint Cerf, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist, about “Tracking the Internet into the 21st Century”.

Posted August 17, 2007 8:17 am by David Brown 0 Comments

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Let Google give you the 411

Currently only available in the States, Google recently launched a free directory service, catchingly titled Google Voice Local Search (we prefer Goog411). The whole system is based on voice recognition and completely automated, meaning costs can be kept low. How they’ll earn any revenue from this is unclear but imagine the difference this could make in the UK – the competition for 118 services is incredibly fierce. Google could certainly put a spanner in the works.

Posted May 29, 2007 9:24 am by Alex Horner 0 Comments

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The big players’ search sandboxes

Alpha and searchmash have recently been launched by Yahoo and Google respectively. Both engines share a similar premise: draw in a variety of different search results ranging from images to Wikipedia entries but all on a single, unrefreshed page. It’s possible to expand and collapse the different categories so if for example you’re only interested in video, you can minimize other results and expand only video ones. With searchmash it’s even possible to play videos within the search results page as embedded YouTube files – a nice touch. Owing to Yahoo’s other ventures they have the advantage of Flickr and Yahoo Answers results too.

Posted April 10, 2007 3:52 pm by Alex Horner 0 Comments

Filed under: Innovations | Tags: ,,