Google and Yahoo! have for a long time customized their logos on numerous holidays throughout the year. This practice has been going on for years, and its hard to tell who was doing it first (Google's first "doodle" logo appeared in 1999, for Yahoo! that information is harder to come by -- if anyone knows when they first started modifying their logo for holidays, please chime in!). More recently, Ask got in on the act.
Today, being Thanksgiving (a major US holiday) is no different. All three have spruced up their logos in the celebratory spirit (they are the only members of the "big 5" search engines to do so). Presented below are the Thanksgiving day logos from Google, Yahoo! and Ask. [Correction: AOL also has a holiday logo, and the post has been updated to include it!] Which is your favorite? Which company consistently provides the best holiday logo modifications? Share your thoughts in the comments.
While it's a holiday arguably celebrating imperialism here in the US, there's a whole world online that's still busy at work. RWW has covered the top Web 2.0 sites in a wide variety of countries, but the continent of Africa has not been covered. The must-read blog Black Looks posted today on a Flickr chart of African Web 2.0 company logos assembled by African entrepreneur Neville Newey (update - my bad, got two people mixed up) Erik Hersman, who goes by the handle White African. Newey was the creator of Muti, a Digg type site for news about Africa, among other things. If you're interested, I interviewed Newey last year here.
When Google and others ganged up on Facebook a few weeks ago,
to many of us, Open Social looked like a marketing move. The news came
suspiciously close to Facebook's ad platform announcement and after a close look, the API looked very raw. Most participants just announced their
support without having any concrete implementation.
Yet, Open Social is not a fluke and neither it is an accident. It is an important step in the evolution of social and open web, a step that we have seen taken before in other circumstances. It is called commoditization. By creating an exchange of gadgets and social information Google and Co. declared that the era of social silos is over. In this post we look at the details of the open social API, discuss its adoption and look into the future of the social web.
Political action and consumer advocacy organization MoveOn this week launched a public campaign against Facebook's new Project Beacon advertising system (our coverage). MoveOn characterizes the ad system as "a huge invasion of privacy" and has launched a petition to get Facebook to make the system completely opt-in (rather than opt-out as it is currently). MoveOn even blames Facebook for ruining Christmas, including in a press release sent out to the media today quotes from users like this one: "I saw my gf [girlfriend] bought an item I had been saying I wanted...so now part of my Christmas gift has been ruined. Facebook is ruining Christmas!" - Matthew from New York
According to MoveOn's Civic Communications Director Adam Green, "Facebook users across the nation are outraged that the books, movies, and gifts they buy privately on other sites are being displayed publicly without permission--and it's time for Facebook to reverse this massive privacy breach." (CNET) There are a few problems with that statement, though.
First, MoveOn may be overstating the level of outrage among Facebook users. In the past, when Facebook has done something that users don't like (i.e., create the news feed, open up to non-college users, etc.), many groups have been created almost overnight to protest the issue. Those groups have grown virally, quickly and often top hundreds of thousands of users in a matter of days. Just recently, hundreds of groups popped up around Facebook to protest the mandatory use of the word "is" in status updates -- one group had over 160,000 users. I could not find any group, barring MoveOn's own, protesting Beacon (or SocialAds) with over 100.
There was a time before Facebook when social networking on the Internet was about making anonymous connections with people you'd never met before rather than a way to keep an eye on the people you already know. Some of my closest friends today began as anonymous online acquaintances ten years ago -- people who I shared a common experience with and didn't exchange personal information with until I was good and ready. With some of the newer breed of social networks, such as Facebook, which requires that you use your real name, that sort of anonymity is impossible.
The Experience Project (EP), which launched a public beta about a year ago, is built specifically around the concept of remaining anonymous while socializing. The site has grown to 250,000 members, almost 60% of those added in the past three months, and is backed by an impressive line up of angel investors including Ron Conway, Kathryn Gould, and Steve Blank.
According to EP, by emphasizing and encouraging anonymous interaction, the site allows people to open up more than they do on other social networking sites. One member gushes, "this is the most real representation of myself anywhere -- friends, family or online. I've never felt so accepted nor had more fun anywhere online."
Blog search engine Feedster has had the following notice on its frontpage for at least a few weeks now:
There is no sign of life on the site and the Feedster blog has already been killed off (the big 404 in the sky).
In terms of the blog search market in general, Feedster has been struggling for 3+ years now - this RWW post in July 2005 shows how Feedster was falling behind Technorati even then. Now Feedster seems to be, if not in the DeadPool, then at least in the PurgatoryPool. PubSub was another victim in this market.
Nowadays, the blog search market seems to be made up of 3 main players - Google Blog Search, Technorati and Bloglines/Ask.com - and a lot of smaller players such as Zuula and Blogdigger. Personally I still use Technorati a few times a week, and the search function of Google Reader. I also am a heavy user of Google's main search, which I find brings up good blog results (i.e. often I don't see the need for a specialist blog search engine). I did a quick poll of the other RWW writers. Josh said he still uses Technorati sometimes, but also Google Blog search. Marshall said that he uses Ask.com for minimizing spam, relies heavily on feeds with subscribers in Bloglines, and uses Technorati too. He finds that Google Blog Search is good for speed.
What blog search engine do you use - and why?
Here in the US it's the busiest travel day of the year and while media events and new product launches lay low, entrepreneurs and geeks are hard at work building the software that will launch in coming weeks. There's no better time to kick back and let yourself get philosophical.
Social software is a whole new world in many ways and people everywhere are trying to figure out how to design effective and compelling applications. I offer for your consideration today three recent attempts to articulate social software design best practices. Let's discuss.
Thomas Vander Wal is the man who coined the term folksonomy, meaning classification through collaborative, social tagging. (His tagging tool of choice, you might note, appears to be Ma.gnolia.)
Yesterday Vander Wal posted the following slide from a presentation he gave this month in Stuttgart, Germany. Like any good venn diagram, there's just a little to look at here but lots to think about.
If you walk into any
suburban Starbucks these days, you won't see people's faces, instead you'll see laptops.
Moms and dads increasingly work from home; broadband took over the US and wireless is
about to do the same. Digital cameras and cell phones have become the eye witnesses of local events.
More and more people are connected to the grid from places previously untouched by technology.
And as they plug into the Internet, they bring with them something that did not exist before - hyperlocal
digital information.
Information processing and information creation are what defines us as a species. When sitting in a local Starbucks, a blogger might write about what it feels like to be in Opelika, Alabama today, for example. On the way to work in Lewistown, Montana an amateur photographer might take a picture of the local grocery store. And all over the US, teenaged clones of Justin.TV will record countless hours of their surroundings.
The net effect of all of this is the increasing availability of fine-grained information about locales. This information is both interesting and valuable. It is sought after by people living in these places and by advertisers who are trying to reach these people. A handful of startups are recognizing the big potential of local information - relevance. In this post we look at different aspects of the hyperlocality, from satellites to local blogs, and ponder how this information will be organized and monetized.
I am the wrong age for Facebook or MySpace. But I happen to have a relative who is in the LA music scene, who gave me a tour from his perspective - and now I totally get it. A few decades ago that is where I would have hung out.
I am not looking for a social network. I cannot imagine choosing one single place as my only online hangout and I certainly don’t want the hassle of managing my identity and my relationships on multiple sites. However I am interested in how different tools give different pieces of the social networking puzzle; and what ties them together.
When I wrote about LinkedIn compared to Facebook, some Facebook enthusiasts pointed out that messaging within Facebook is better. I think that is true, but I don’t want to use messaging that is controlled by a site - and I think that is true for most people who grew up with the Internet before social networks evolved. It may be nothing more than habit, but habit matters a lot for adoption.
The reason that LinkedIn is so interesting is that it is the missing piece of the puzzle. We already have two good basic pieces:
1. Blogging tool - Wordpress, Typepad or Blogger.
2. Start page - Pageflakes, Netvibes or MyYahoo.
My online social/business network happens to be WordPress + PageFlakes. PageFlakes is where I consume content and Wordpress is where I create it. If you are interested in what I write you RSS it into your start page. It's not hard.
Sure, that could be MyYahoo, Netvibes or iGoogle instead of PageFlakes; and Typepad or Blogger instead of Wordpress. To update an old phrase: "you loan your attention you takes your choice." Choice really is the point. Unlike the all-in-one stereo system of Facebook, I get to mix and match my speakers and woofers as I want (yes I know, that analogy dates me). Switch PageFlakes for Netvibes? Sure, if it is different enough.
The latest figures on the state of the US newspaper advertising industry indicate that print advertising sales have continued to plummet. Online ad sales, however, have risen significantly, though not enough to offset the sharp decline in print ad revenue.
The Newspaper Association of America said that print ad spending fell 9% in the third quarter compared to the same period last year to $10.1 billion. Online ad spending, which rose to $770 million, makes up just 7.1% of the industry's ad revenue, and though up sharply from 5.4% a year ago, it was still not enough to offset the declines in spending elsewhere. On the whole, newspaper ad spending fell 7.4% in the third quarter.
