Posts Tagged interesting
Gmail With Drag & Drop
Posted by Hassan Alsheikh in Articles on July 2nd, 2009
Drag and drop has come to Gmail: you can now drag a message by its left-hand grid, and move it into a label/ folder to the left side. Also, you can now re-arrange labels via drag & drop.
[Thanks Cookie Lee and Niranjan!]
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Gmail With Drag & Drop | Comments]
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Gmail With Drag & Drop
Bing Starts to Get Real (Time)
Posted by Hassan Alsheikh in Articles, Twitter on July 2nd, 2009
I’ve been complaining that nearly no search engines surface real time data (for now, that’s Twitter, but Facebook is coming soon enough, and there will be tons more). In fact, I complained to Microsoft about this well before the launch of Bing, and then complained some more when Twitter results were not surfaced in initial beta versions of the service. Man, I’m grumpy lately, eh?
Well, that’s changing. Sort of. From a Bing blog post today:
There has been much discussion of real-time search and the premium on immediacy of data that has been created primarily by Twitter. We’ve been watching this phenomenon with great interest, and listening carefully to what consumers really want in this space. Today we’re unveiling an initial foray into integrating more real time data into our search results, starting with some of the more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres. This includes Tweets from folks from our own search technology and business sphere like Danny Sullivan or Kara Swisher as well as those from spheres of more general consumer appeal like Al Gore or Ryan Seacrest. Starting later today, when you search for these folks names in association with Twitter, you’ll see their latest Tweets come up in real time on Bing’s search results.
Oh boy! I wonder if maybe…I’m one of those folks? Sigh. No such luck. Although, to be honest, I can’t seem to make it work for anyone, including Danny and Kara. Maybe it’s not working yet in my area.
In any case, what DOES come up is my and everyone else I tested’s Twitter account, at least when I add “Twitter” to the query. That’s a major step forward from where Bing was even at launch. That said, there is NO reason to make folks put the word “Twitter” into the query. None. That is a failed use case. Commit, or don’t commit, but don’t ask users to specify Twitter to know what someone might be saying in real time. Better to indicate that the query has real time results, and offer them if a searcher wants them. Or figure out some other clever UI solution. Real time is here to stay, may as well design to it, and not ask users to do it for you.
After all, with the whole Websquared thing, we’ll soon be leaving real time trails all over the globe, and we may well want them surfaced by our favorite search engine, no?
But good on ya, Microsoft, for dipping your toe into the water. Google, your ball.
UPDATE: It works now. I’m one of the chosen ones! Oh joy!
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Bing Starts to Get Real (Time)
Google v. Facebook? What We Learn from Twitter.
Posted by Hassan Alsheikh in Articles on June 23rd, 2009
Last week I wrote a post in which I opined a bit about Facebook search. In it I wrote:
Facebook is way more than its newsfeed, and its search play is key to proving that value, and extending it….No doubt building Facebook search today is akin to building Google ten years ago – bigger, most likely, in terms of data, algorithmic, and platform challenges.
If only I had waited a few days, I could have pointed to Fred’s piece in Wired, out this week. He profiles the ongoing feud between the King of Search, Google, and the upstart, Facebook. In his piece, he writes:
For the last decade or so, the Web has been defined by Google’s algorithms—rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline. In Zuckerberg’s vision, users will query this “social graph” to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone to hire—rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search. It is a complete rethinking of how we navigate the online world, one that places Facebook right at the center. In other words, right where Google is now.
I agree that of all the contenders out there right now (including Twitter), Facebook has the most data, position, and potential to upset Google’s dominance of the web. But I disagree with one premise of the piece, which is that Facebook’s proprietary approach to the data it stores presents a blind spot to Google that gives Facebook a competitive edge. Fred writes:
Together, this data comprises a mammoth amount of activity, almost a second Internet. By Facebook’s estimates, every month users share 4 billion pieces of information—news stories, status updates, birthday wishes, and so on. They also upload 850 million photos and 8 million videos. But anyone wanting to access that stuff must go through Facebook; the social network treats it all as proprietary data, largely shielding it from Google’s crawlers. Except for the mostly cursory information that users choose to make public, what happens on Facebook’s servers stays on Facebook’s servers. That represents a massive and fast-growing blind spot for Google, whose long-stated goal is to “organize the world’s information.”
I think it’s a major strategic mistake to not offer this information to Google (and anyone else that wants to crawl it.) In fact, I’d argue that the right thing to do is to make just about everything possible available to Google to crawl, then sit back and watch while Google struggles with whether or not to “organize it and make it universally available.” A regular damned if you do, damned if you don’t scenario, that….
For an example of what I mean, look no further than Twitter. That service makes every single tweet available as a crawlable resource. And Google certainly is crawling Twitter pages, but the key thing to watch is whether the service is surfacing “superfresh” results when the query merits it. So far, the answer is a definitive NO.
Why?
Well, perhaps I’m being cynical, but I think it’s because Google doesn’t want to push massive value and traffic to Twitter without a business deal in place where it gets to monetize those real time results.
Is that “organizing the world’s information and making it universally available?” Well, no. At least, not yet.
By making all its information available to Google’s crawlers (and fixing its terrible URL structure in the process), Facebook could shine an awfully bright light on this interesting conflict in interest.
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Google v. Facebook? What We Learn from Twitter.
Google Adds Facebook Friends to Results
Posted by Hassan Alsheikh in Articles on June 22nd, 2009
I’m not sure how new this is, but when a Facebook user’s profile is returned in Google’s search results, you can now see the user’s location (or network) and a random selection of their friends, as shown on their public profile.
I’m not seeing any special markup in the Facebook profile page, but could this be Google’s “Rich Snippets” feature in action, as announced at this year’s Searchology conference?
[Thanks Luke!]
[By Tony Ruscoe | Origin: Google Adds Facebook Friends to Results | Comments]
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Google Adds Facebook Friends to Results