Google says it gets smarter every day, but today the company made a big enough leap in what it shows to users that an announcement was in order. The company blog post says that today's improvements are intended to "get you to the web page you want as quickly as possible." Looking at the changes that were made, though, it seems to us like the result will be just the opposite.
A greater number of related queries will now be listed for many searches and longer page excerpts ("snippets") will be shown in response to longer search queries. Those look to us like ways to keep people on Google longer.
This morning, Face.com announced that they're bringing advanced facial recognition technology to Facebook by way of a new application called Photo Finder. Using proprietary facial scanning algorithms, this application scans through your photos and those public photos belonging to your friends in order to identify and suggest tags for the untagged people within them. The results of these scans are highly accurate - almost frighteningly so - and should lead to some interesting discoveries as the app spreads through Facebook when it finally becomes public.
Limited invites available, click though to learn more!
A few days ago, over at Gina Trapani's new Smarterware blog, I read about another new web-based music player and playlist creator, MixTape.me. I've reviewed several takes on the same basic concept recently, so I didn't immediately write this one up. But I went ahead and gave it a spin, listening to a few of the popular playlists and searching for my favorite artists on the service. And, as it turns out, this application hits all the right notes in terms of interface design, plus its mere existence is a testament to the power of mashups.
StoryTlr, a lifestreaming service that debuted to a lot of positive press last year, has (among several other enhancements) debuted a major new feature today: Pages. This is a new gallery format view of selected portions of a total lifestream, essentially as a slideshow. StoryTlr adds this new ability to its already rich aggregation support of different social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, RSS feeds and Digg. Also updated is support for tags and a new theme.
With summer just a few months away, students the world over are gearing up for exams and starting to think about what to do during summer 2009. While some will be enjoying a much needed break, others will be looking at ways to make extra money in what is shaping up to be one of our worst ever recessions.
But there is an alternative for the geeky set: Google's Summer of Code. Now in its fifth year, the Summer of Code will match 1000 students to 150 mentors from around the globe, and give them a chance to work on projects such as WordPress, Mozilla Project, GNOME, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Chromium, Creative Commons, Berkman Center at Harvard University, even the project's own collaborative software, Melange.
Ada Lovelace, a 19th century British writer who is considered the world's first computer programmer, will be honored by bloggers all over the world tomorrow. In the spirit of providing young women with role models, more than 1500 bloggers participating in the first annual Ada Lovelace Day have pledged to write about a woman or women they admire working in technology on March 24th. You can read about Lovelace on Wikipedia.
Mike Rohde was named the official "sketchnoter" of the South by Southwest Interactive conference this month in Austin and his sketches are the only form of note taking we've ever wanted to spend time going through after an event. Panel discussions at conferences are notoriously disappointing, but Rohde has done the dirty work and made it easy and fun for all of us to learn the lessons that speakers like Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, web standards guru Jeffrey Zeldman and many others came to Austin to share.
Before everyone panics, let's get one thing clear: the new Twitter worm is only a proof-of-concept devised by computer security researchers at Secure Science - it is not out in the wild. That said, its very existence should raise some questions about the state of security at Twitter - something that's more important than ever given how rapidly the service is becoming mainstream. This latest security concern involves an attack, similar to the clickjacking incident from last month, that takes advantage of a web programming error on Twitter's support site. The result of the attack would force users to post unwanted messages to their Twitter stream. If those messages were combined with malicious code, "this could even be used to take control of a victim's computer," says Lance James, chief scientist of Secure Science.
Wait, kids have iPhones?
A new application in the iPhone App Store brings parental control mechanisms to Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch. Like other types of "net nanny" software, the iWonder application lets parents filter web site traffic, monitor what sites their kids are surfing, control permissions, and even remotely disable the device.
If you're anything like me - and if you're reading this, chances are you are - you have a lot of online identities to juggle. LinkedIn, FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook, Google Friend Connect, Google Enemy Connect, Google Ex-Sexual-Partner Connect... there's a lot.
But for some people, that isn't enough. They have armies of online alts: alternate identities, like a second avatar in Second Life or another face for Facebook. Some use them for testing purposes, a way of peering through the eyes of a regular user instead of the God-like perspective of an admin. (You know, the way a certain emperor supposedly disguised himself as a commoner for one day every year and went out to mingle with the masses. It was history's first attempt at QA.)
