At 11:00 p.m. Pacific on a Monday night, 7:55 a.m. Tuesday morning in Europe, Google posted a gem on its official blogs. "Greater choice for wireless access point owners," the post is called. It's a follow-up on a promise made in September to offer people with Wi-Fi networks a way to opt out of sharing their location data with Google.
If you want to opt out, Google says, you have to figure out how to add "_nomap." to the end of your SSID name. Can't figure out how to do that? Oh well (here's how). Google, and I quote, "found that a method based on wireless network names provides the right balance of simplicity as well as protection against abuse. Specifically, this approach helps protect against others opting out your access point without your permission." You hear that? Google wants to protect you from someone turning off your location sharing without your permission. It's for your protection, citizens.
Continuing our series about the Consumer Cloud, today we compare the three leading music cloud services: Apple's iTunes Match (just launched today), Amazon's Cloud Drive and Google Music. With these three highly competitive services, online music fans have never had it so good.
There are two main battles going on in the online music market, each of which is benefiting consumers greatly. One is between the three so-called cloud lockers mentioned above, which are competing to be the online archive for your digital music collection. The second battle is about whether you even need an online archive at all.
Google revealed 10 recent changes to its search algorithm today, including one to favor "fresher" results over older content in certain situations. Detection of "official" sites or pages has also improved. Other updates improve search snippets and page titles, as well as info retrieval across languages, among other tweaks.
In addition to the algorithm itself, Google has changed features of the search interface recently. It eliminated the "Timeline" view of results to organize them by date range, and it has integrated Google+ social content in a variety of ways.
Last week Google+ introduced brand pages, an almost exact match for Facebook Pages. While Google now claims that Google+ is not a competitor to Facebook, the Pages products are so similar that they are bound to go head-to-head. Brands are going to end up getting more value out of one or the other.
In this post we look at the early efforts of two leading luxury car brands: BMW and Mercedes-Benz. The comparison shows that Facebook has a clear first-mover advantage in user numbers and its comparatively advanced developer platform. But Facebook shouldn't get complacent, Google+ has a lot of promise as a destination site where brands can truly engage their fans.
As Google works to emphasize up-to-the-minute search results, it has also quietly killed off a search feature that helped users search for content from the past. As users in the Google search help forum have noticed, the Timeline feature for Web search has disappeared. It helped filter search results for specific timeframes.
Timeline view is still available in Google News, but it only searches certain archived publications instead of all Web results. Google community managers have suggested the normal date range filter as an alternative, but this isn't a browsable feature like Timeline was. Just as it has done with Google Reader in recent weeks, Google has killed off a feature used by a small but dedicated set of its users.
As of October 2011, 850,000 U.S. veterans were unemployed. The jobless rate for post-9/11 vets hit 12.1 percent. With an estimated one million service members scheduled to leave the military between 2011 and 2016, it was high time for President Obama to find new ways to help vets find civilian jobs. In addition to launching a government resource on WhiteHouse.gov, Obama teamed up with LinkedIn and Google to offer additional resources for veterans.
LinkedIn now tags job postings that might be best for veterans, and Google offers additional tools for the building the military veteran community online.
Google just sealed an acquisition deal with Katango, a company that builds algorithms for automatically sorting friends. The Kleiner Perkins-backed company was founded in 2010. The Katango team will be incorporated into the Google+ team.
Katango's previous product was an iPhone app that sorted Facebook friends into lists automatically. Google could use the same algorithms to make the work of maintaining Google+ circles easier.
On Halloween, Google announced an initiative called "why these ads." It's a campaign to increase transparency and show users why a particular ad was targeted to them. A "why these ads?" link now appears next to some ads on Google search and Gmail. Clicking it opens a pop-up with an explanation, even though it's often nothing more than "this ad is based on your current search terms."
The pop-up also offers a link to the ads preferences manager, where users can see exactly how Google profiles them for advertising. It shows categories, which can be removed or edited, as well as your inferred age and gender. It also shows the ID of your browser cookie, which Google tracks to personalize your ads. You can also manage blocked advertisers and opt out of personalized ads altogether.
Google continues the inevitable wallpapering of the Web with the +1 button, adding it to image search today. This makes Google image search into a social affair, highlighting images and displaying annotated recommendations from your +friends. Images will now appear in the +1 tab of Google+ profiles.
This extends the Google+-powered personalization of Google search results into the realm of images. Social search could be the greatest impact of Google+, since the +1 button now affects the way Google search results appear. For anyone logged into his or her Google account, social signals have begun to affect the results of all kinds of Web searches whether users want that or not.
Google has begun the rollout of Google+ sidebar widgets for websites to promote the new brand pages. It's only visible to members of the Google+ platform preview group, which anyone can join, but Google is not yet launching this feature to the public. There is a publicly visible configuration tool to create badges and preview badges.
The widget displays a +1 button and an 'Add to circles' button for the chosen Google+ page. Google+ is joining Facebook and Twitter in providing sidebar widgets for users to promote their social media pages from their own websites. But Google+ badges come with a bonus: they enroll the page in Google+ Direct Connect, so users can find them with a Google search using a +, like "+ReadWriteWeb".
