Netizen

Sunday, June 21, 2009

Microblogging Search: What Took Google So Long?

Google has had a blog search for a while now. But it has stayed away from Twitter search for too long. I am glad finally they are doing it, because nobody else is.

Google to Launch a Microblogging Search Engine Google prepares to launch a service that indexes and ranks content from microblogging services like Twitter. ...... Twitter's search engine has two important drawbacks: it's limited to Twitter and it sorts the results by date. While there are other search engines like Tweefind that try to sort Twitter posts by relevancy and search engines like Twingly that index multiple microblogging sites, none of them does a great job. ...... will sort the results by relevancy

About time this happened.

My expectations have been low. I want to be able to find everything I ever tweeted. Is that too much to ask? Has been for the native Twitter search engine.

Monetizing Twitter: A Few Ideas
Real Time Search: Twitter Is Not Doing It

From The Netizen BlogRoll

Obama To Iran's Leaders: Stop 'Unjust' Actions
Iran Election Crisis: 10 Incredible YouTube Videos
AOL’s PoliticsDaily Quickly Surpasses Rival Politico, MediaGlow Sites Continue To Grow after being launched only a month and a half ago ..... received 2.4 million unique visitors compared to 1.1 million unique visitors on Politico.com in May. ......... primarily focuses on in-depth political commentary as opposed to breaking news, provides only original content, from long-form analysis to blog posts on issues in the U.S. political landscape ......... the MediaGlow team is looking to pick up the remnants of the dying print magazine business and digitize this content ......... The Huffington Post saw 5.3 million unique visits in May ...... HuffPo’s a content aggregator
Not Only Was Steve Jobs Sick, He Had A Liver Transplant Jobs has long been thought to be perhaps more important to his company than any single figure is to their’s. But his time away has seemingly proven otherwise
Flip Has Little Chance In An iPhone World The video capable iPhone ........ Along the way Pure Digital fought ridicule from the big video camera companies, who said nobody would want the device. Then, once Pure Digital proved the market, all those competitors jumped in with their own offerings. There are now many devices with similar tech specs as the Flip, but Pure Digital has managed to stay ahead of them all by innovating faster. ......... the iPhone has something that the Flip will never realistically have, cellular and wifi connectivity that lets you upload your videos immediately. .......... You can do basic editing right on the iPhone, and publish it to YouTube immediately. As an added bonus, that video can be geo-stamped via the phone’s GPS capability. ......... iPhone users will be able to stream video in real time from their phones to the Internet. ........ within a couple of years video will be as ubiquitous on those phones as photos are today
Google Flipper Is About To Jump Out Of The Water
Don’t be surprised if Amazon has to raise the price of Kindle books
AdSense: The (Weak) Elephant in the Room AdSense is 30% of Google's revenue ........ Facebook just hired the guy who masterminded AdSense
IPhone 3.0 is Coming Tomorrow: Here is What You Can Expect
Dear CNN, Please Check Twitter for News About Iran The western world's most feared government is shaking with insurrection in the streets ........ the extensive use of Twitter by Iranians in the uprising. ....... real-time, online, crowdsourced media is the best place to keep up with current events
Top 10 YouTube Videos of All Time
Dear Wanna-bes, Your Twitter Stardom is Coming to an End
Google to Launch Microblogging Search Engine? the Google Operating System blog reports that Google will be launching a new microblogging search service that will sort results by relevance and integrate those results with its own web search engine to trigger a "microblog universal search group", closely related to the way Google Blog Search works. If it turns out to be true, this is great news to those of us who constantly search Twitter for the latest news and trends.
Want to Work for the City of Bozeman, MT? Hand Over Your Social Network Logins and Passwords

Google Wave Protest

Saturday, June 20, 2009

Google Wave API Google Group: Stalinist Mindset

Image by Freedom Toast via Flickr

I just noticed I have been banned from the Google Group called Google Wave API. The decision sounds Stalinist to me. I would have understood if this was a group for hard core coders who only talked about code. But there were numerous threads on all sorts of non code topics there.

My "crime" was that I pushed forth the opinion that code is important, but so is the coder community and that community's culture. Code is important, but without vision the people shall perish. That I was interested in vision, and community, and I was very interested in code, because I wanted to follow the conversations in the group to be able to spot the trends as they emerge in the Wave developer community. But some genius went ahead and banned me from the group. I don't know where I would go to appeal the decision.

The Google Wave Developer Community Will Be Vibrant
Five Blind Men And Google Wave
A Little Trouble At The Google Wave API Google Group
Lessons From The Open Source Community For The Wave Community

Image via Wikipedia

Google Wave Developer Community: Asking For A Culture?
The Google Corporate Culture

My Twitter Suspension Lifted
Can Tweet Google, Can't Tweet Twitter
Netizen Is No Spam Blog
Google: Tweet Me Baby One More Time
I Talked To Google Through Twitter And It Worked Like Magic

This is so ridiculous. The guy who banned me from the group is like the five blind men, he thinks he is feeling the trunk: Five Blind Men And Google Wave.

What makes this ban extra ridiculous is if you are not a member of the group, you can still read its content, but I can't.

From The Google Wave Developer Blog

TwilioBot: Bringing Phone Conversations into Waves
1 Wave Sandbox, 5 Hours, 17 Awesome Demos
The Making of the Sudoku Gadget
Google Wave API Office Hours
Google Wave team heads to Google Developer Days in Asia
Introducing the Google Wave APIs: what can you build?

From The Official Google Blog

Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave.

Friday, June 19, 2009

Space, Time And Twitter: Are There Plant Twitters?

Wyclef Jean via last.fm

Imagine a newspaper or a TV station that has a bureau in every town on earth, in every capital city. Can you imagine one step further? Imagine a newspaper or network that has someone covering every human being. That is what Twitter is. And Twitter is not a newspaper or a network. Evan Williams is not my Editor In Chief. I don't report to the dude, cool as he is. I don't even report to the world. I don't report to me. It is not important to say out loud who if anyone I report to. But my thought fragments matter. They are fundamental to the social fabric of the world. I matter if or not I want to participate in the jamboree. To twitter is to say you don't need to get on TV, you don't need a microphone, you don't need a gathered audience, you don't

Image by richard.pyrker via Flickr

need a special day, or a special moment. Every moment is special if you think it is. That is Twitter.

The 140 Characters Conference: twitter as a News Gathering Tool
Chris Sacca and Wyclef Jean at 140 Characters Conference
The 140 Twitter Conference Is Over…Say It Is Not So!!
Twitter, Twitter, Twitter Everywhere…

What Twitter captures is the basic building block of our social reality. A tweet is an atom. The social reality already existed. Even with old media and with mainstream media, the reality still existed, and the building block was still the atom, the tweet. But now, with Twitter, we get to map that social reality, one tweet at a time.

Twitter is about power to the people where power should have been all along. I wondered o

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

ut loud once in the late 1990s as to why people talk of term limits for politicians but not for the talking heads on TV. Some of them stick around for decades. And they have power over opinions.

Democracy means the political power rests with the people. Social media - it should really be one word like democracy - means the media power rests with the people.

My Twitter Suspension Lifted
Can Tweet Google, Can't Tweet Twitter
Monetizing Twitter: A Few Ideas

The Google Wave Developer Community Will Be Vibrant

After the initial euphoria upon Google Wave's arrival there has been a backlash of sorts against the enthusiasm in the pretense of not knowing what Google Wave actually is, or will do. But that has been among the chattering classes. The enthusiasm, if anything, has heightened within the budding developer community.

I suggested at the Google Wave API Google Group that code and culture/community are both important. I stand by that assertion. But that is not to say I want to focus on community talk and not code talk. Actually my primary motivation for joining the group has been to follow, and to an extent contribute to the code talk primarily to be able to spot trends in the developer community as Google Wave readies for the masses in a few months. Code talk is important to me.

One can but imagine what the Google Wave developer community will look like as it grows. I think some of that community's characteristics are going to be as follows.

The Google Wave developer community will be global.
Many top developers will make big money.
Google Wave's development will have an element of unpredictability. Once the genie is out of the bottle, there is no telling what twists and turns the developments will take.
There are going to be major social, political implications of Google Wave.
Google Wave MeetUps might sprout all over the place and might become the primary socializing tool among the Google Wave developers.
The Google Wave developer community will be numerically huge.
The community will have many corporate members.

In the mean time I want to do my homework to be able to participate in the code talk to the extent that I am in a better position to be able to spot trends.

Five Blind Men And Google Wave
A Little Trouble At The Google Wave API Google Group
Google Wave Developer Community: Asking For A Culture?
The Google Corporate Culture
Google Wave: Organizations Will Go Topsy Turvy
Google Wave: Enormous Buzz
Possible Google Wave Applications And Innovations
Google Wave Architecture: Designed For Mass, Massive, Global Innovation
The Google Wave Architecture
Google Wave Ripples
Is Google Wave Social Enough To Challenge Facebook, Twitter?
Of Waves And Tsunamis
Google Wave: Wave Of The Future?
Google Wave: If Email Were Invented Today

From The Google Wave Developer Blog

TwilioBot: Bringing Phone Conversations into Waves One of the powerful features of Google Wave is the ease with which developers can integrate it with existing APIs. ...... At the Post-I/O hackathon, I used the Twilio API to extend Wave into the world of telephony. ....... "voice waves." When a user adds twiliobot to a wave, the robot automatically finds and transforms the phone numbers in that wave into click-to-call links. .......... The subsequent phone conversation can then be recorded, transcribed, and automatically inserted into the wave as text with a link to the audio of the conversation. ........ Google has provided an amazingly powerful API, and I bet you'll have real code running in Wave in under an hour.
1 Wave Sandbox, 5 Hours, 17 Awesome Demos on the Friday after I/O, about 60 developers assembled down at Google HQ for the very first Google Wave API hackathon. ....... Evan Cooke kicked off the demos with an amazing app that showed off the Twilio API by calling a phone number from a Wave, transcribing the conversation to text, and pasting it back into the wave. Andres Ferrate, who had never before programmed in Python or App Engine, showed off the first monetizing extension: a robot that searched Amazon for DVDs and books, and gave him a cut of any purchases made off the links. ........... At the end of all the demos (too many to describe here!), Lars thanked all the developers and said, "I was so happy after seeing the first two demos, I nearly cried." ....... If you're a developer that's eager to hack on Wave, read through the documentation, check out the various samples, and make sure to request sandbox access.
The Making of the Sudoku Gadget
Google Wave API Office Hours
Google Wave team heads to Google Developer Days in Asia
Introducing the Google Wave APIs: what can you build?

From The Official Google Blog

Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave.

In The News

Will You Be a Slave to Google's Wave? eWeek

Will Google Wave revolutionise free software collaboration? Free Software Magazine Where Android is an open system on closed hardware — and thus become semi-closed in the process — we have a chance here to develop Wave into a host of free and open tools based on the Wave API and using the Wave protocol. ........ imagine having a wave for the developers of a software project. ....... Hack-fests could include those unable to attend the live venue by having everyone use a wave — no longer need the best minds be excluded because they couldn’t book a flight ...... Google Wave could outstrip Twitter and Facebook by 2011.
Jargon from Hell Rides in on Google's Wave Gawker The open secret about Google's forthcoming product "Wave" is that no one knows what the hell it does.
Google Searches for Ways to Keep Big Ideas Wall Street Journal

Google looks to fast-track employee ideas CNET News Google is being forced to adapt to life as a big corporation with structure and processes ....... It's also grappling with the notion that it's no longer the automatic destination for Silicon Valley's most skilled engineers and marketers who are looking to do cool work and get rich. Companies like Facebook have lots of ex-Google employees within their ranks, and start-ups through the Valley are headed by those with a stint at Google on their resume.
Adobe Launches Online Spreadsheet, Web Collaboration PC Magazine

Adobe launches competitor to Google Docs ZDNet UK estimated real-time collaboration to be a two-billion-dollar opportunity for Adobe. ........ collaborating on documents directly in a fluid online environment
Is Opera Unite a Good Idea Done Badly for Google to Do Better with ... eWeek Opera is attempting to take advantage of the rise of social networking (the verb) and bake it into the browser ........ their desire was not to own the network, but to compete on it. ...... we don't know exactly what Google Wave will turn out to be

Web Semantics: Google Wave Jargon Wired News Wave .... Wavelet ..... Blip ..... children .... Document ...... Extension ...... Gadgets and Robots ..... Embeded Wave

Google Hunkers Down on Software Projects with 'Innovation Reviews' eWeek Eric Schmidt told Jessica Vascellaro he is afraid Google's normally hands-off approach to managing product teams is letting good ideas stagnate or slip out the door in the mass exodus of frustrated Googlers whose mental seeds can't find purchase in the giant Google garden. ....... The corporatization of Google continues. ....... Until now, Google has been pretty lackadaisical regarding the 20% projects and has treated employee defections with a shoulder shrug. ...... It will almost certainly scare off those who expect a "startup environment." Those halcyon days appear over

Google Scrambling After Launch of “Decision Engine” GigaOm Sergey Brin is personally leading a team inside the company to analyze Bing’s search engine and make changes to Google’s search results as necessary. ....... Microsoft is no startup, and has plenty of talent, money and marketing muscle to throw at Google — plus, for now, maybe a better product, too.

Why Bing is not Wave of the future ZDNet Asia Bing is a competent search engine that looks like Google search. Wave is an experiment in merging identity, data and messaging that looks like nothing on Earth. ...... the excitement is all Wave's. ...... Wave is pointing to the future, Bing to the past. ....... Microsoft talks of innovation, and it invests in research, but it defaults to stasis and duplication.

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