Google has formed a partnership with Twitter very recently. What this partnership entails is that users searching for information via Google will able to get more up-to-the-minute, real-time data in the search result. Tweets will also be included in each search result for more diversified result. According to their blog, Google plans on releasing more products and features that focus on this real-time search feature, which means quicker results for searches.
And since Social Networking seems to be becoming the latest social norm for communication these days, Google has also demonstrated a new product called Social Search. The new addition to the search procedure allows you to get search results with content that is written by your friends or people you follow. Social Search will be launching soon onGoogle Experimental and Google Labs.
Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin has just fabricated a abruptness actualization at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. He discussed Twitter, advertising, Bing, and answered admirers questions.
Here are some of the highlights:
On Tim Armstrong: Tim Armstrong acclimated to be one of Google’s top executives, but afresh became the CEO of AOL. They saw anniversary added backstage, and said that AOL was advantageous to accept anyone of his ability at the helm.
On Twitter: He was actual blessed for Evan Williams, Twitter Co-founder and CEO, who awash his aboriginal company, Blogger, to Google years ago. He was not alone complex in the Twitter seek deal.
Then he was asked by John Battelle whether or not he (Google) approved to access Twitter. He artlessly declared that “I did not try to buy Twitter,” but if a companies access them, they consider.
On online advertising: “The Internet as an commercial belvedere is actual efficient,” he said. He thinks Internet ante are traveling to go up, “a ascent tide.” He discussed the accommodation to actualize AdWords, allotment of their amount commercial system. A acceptable decision, if we say so ourselves.
On entering new areas: Google enters areas area they acquisition problems. Gmail, for example, they entered because solutions at that time were not scalable, did not about-face amid computers easily, etc. Android apparent the botheration of closed, proprietary adaptable operating systems.
On Bing: He declared that seek is a aggressive bazaar and business. He said he uses all seek engines (not surprising).
On the Yahoo/Microsoft Deal: He wouldn’t animadversion on whether the seek accord should go through, but did say that Yahoo has some innovations he hopes don’t just disappear.
On Chrome for Mac: Sergey is currently application Chrome for Mac. He’s been aghast with the timing of the beta of Chrome for Mac (he would accept rather had them barrage simultaneously), but is admiring with Chrome.
On Google Books: He discussed the altercation surrounding Google Books (there is a claiming by Microsoft, Amazon, and others to a adjustment Google had with authors and publishers), but artlessly declared that he anticipation Google Books provided a huge amount to association by attention and administration books with everyone.
For as long as we can remember the term “Google Phone” has referred to Google’s Android operating system as opposed to an actual Google device.
But this morning TheStreet.com is reporting that there is an offical Google-branded phone on the way, and it will be the product of a partnership between Google and an unnamed smartphone manufacturer.
Even more remarkable is that the rumors have this Google Phone poised to be released before the end of the year and available through retailers instead of carriers. Essentially, the phone would be something you could purchase regardless of your wireless service provider, and the antithesis to the iPhone and its exclusivity with AT&T.
At the center of the rumor is Ashok Kumar, a Northeast Securities analyst, who claims to have spoken with Google’s design partners about the phone and it’s product release strategy. The article speculates, “If talk of the Google phone plan is true, the entrance of a unlocked, low-cost, Web-friendly touchscreen device will probably undercut other Android phone efforts by players like Motorola, Samsung and Dell.”
We’re quite anxious to see how this rumor develops and if there’s any merit to it. We think it would be a smart and logical move for Google, with the potential to steal customers away from Apple and their wildly successful iPhone, which remains exclusive to AT&T in the US.
The Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco has just started, but the conference has already brought some heavy hitters on stage, including Comcast CEO Brian Roberts and Paypal CEO Scott Thompson.
Just moments ago, Twitter Co-Founder and CEO Evan Williams took the stage with Federated Media CEO John Batelle to discuss revenue models, Facebook, potential acquisitions, and Twitter’s (potentially stagnating) growth.
Here are some of the highlights:
- On revenue models: They’ve done a lot of thinking about it, but they’re spending “approximately 97% of their efforts” on perfecting and growing the Twitter platform. Basically, he was coy about the company’s revenue strategy. John brought up the idea of “TweetSense” and “TweetWords” (a play on the popular Google AdSense and AdWords platforms), but Evan didn’t admit to anything.
However, he did say that they are optimistic on revenue, with so many brand advertisers and “theoretically monetizable information” available on the Twitter platform, the Twitter CEO isn’t worried about generating significant revenue in the near future.
- On Twitter’s growth: Evan admitted that Twitter’s U.S. traffic has stalled the last few months, but that some new features (such as Twitter Lists) should help solve this problem. He also pointed to international and mobile growth.
- On user retention: He stated that they have never been very good at finding that “killer application” for using Twitter for individuals, but that is now their focus. Twitter Lists is a big way to address this problem, Evan quickly added. They see it as a problem, but one that they can fix with some focus.
- On potential acquisition: Twitter is going for a long-term strategy rather than a “grow and be acquired” strategy. Part of it is that Twitter has potential, and part of it is that Evan Williams doesn’t feel the same pressure other entrepreneurs have to sell, since he’s already cashed out once before with the sale of Blogger to Google. He doesn’t believe Twitter’s interests align with being part of a bigger company.
- On Facebook: Evan discussed the increasing role of Facebook as a competitor to Twitter, but summed it up with this: “The world is big enough for Facebook and Twitter.”
- On Google Wave: He thinks Google Wave is awesome. He doesn’t know what Google Wave will become, though.
- On developers and revenue: Evan made it clear that developers can reliably invest in their platform. He believes developers are crucial to the Twitter experience.
- On international growth: The top five countries in terms of users: U.S., UK, Brazil, Japan, Indonesia (surprising!).
- On Twitter Lists and the suggested user list: “It’s time to retire the suggested user list.” He thinks they need to do something better and that it has indeed created a distortion in terms of influence.
Look out Amazon: Google just announced plans to open an electronic book store. Unlike Amazon’s strategy with the Kindle dedicated eReader device, Google plans to deliver eBooks to any device with a web browser.
The service, dubbed Google Editions, is slated to launch in the first half of 2010. At launch it will feature about 500,000 eBooks from publishers Google is already working with on Google Book Search. Purchases can be made directly from Google or through partner sites like Barnes & Noble.
Interestingly, Reuters names Amazon.com as a potential retailer for Google’s electronic books. Considering Amazon would surely prefer to sell its own titles for use on the Kindle, and also considering Barnes & Noble plans to launch its own eReader device as well, these 3 partners seem interesting bedfellows.
Looking into how the revenue sharing breaks down, though, it starts to make more sense. When Google sells an eBook outright, the publisher will get 63% of the sale with 37% going to Google. When sold through a retailer, 45% goes to the publisher, 55% goes to the retailer, and Google only takes “a small share.” In this scenario, publishers will have incentive to promote customer purchases direct from Google, and it will be interesting to see what sort of market share grab will come of this.
Good News for the Consumer
To the consumer, Google’s entry into the electronic books market is most certainly a good thing. It means more customer choice, more widespread support for eBook open standards, and better access to the books they buy online. You’ll be able to use your Gmail login to access your Google eBook “library” from almost any device, whether it be desktop, laptop, netbook, phone, or anything else able to access the web.
Does Google’s entry into the electronic books market make you think twice about picking up an eReader like the Kindle or Sony Reader? Or are the gains in reduced eye strain, battery life and portability enough to make you interested in a specialized device?
Passwords remain the primary means of online authentication, despite their shortcomings. That’s why Google wants to make sure users’ passwords won’t be easily defeated.
It’s National Cybersecurity Awareness Month and Google would like to remind you to choose strong passwords for your online services. Coincidentally, several thousand users of Windows Live Hotmail, along with some users of Gmail and Yahoo Mail, are in need of new passwords.
SANS Internet Storm Center handler Adrien de Beaupr is advising users of Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo Mail to change their passwords following the exposure of several thousand Hotmail credentials on a Web site over the weekend.
According to Microsoft, the exposure was likely result of a phishing scam. And reports indicate that some Gmail and Yahoo Mail account information was also revealed.
Anyone who may have entered account information in a phishing site should pick a different password right away.
Google consumer operations associate Michael Santerre advises using unique passwords for every Web site. He suggests selecting a phrase and using the first letter of every word in the phrase or some variation of that as a password, ideally with special characters added in to make it more secure.
Santerre stresses that passwords should be a mixture of letters, numbers, and symbols to minimize the risk of dictionary attacks, by which cybercriminals use programs to try every word in a dictionary database as a potential password.
Using personal information as a password should be avoided because that information can often be found on social network profiles and aggregated from other online sources. Stay away from the names of pets or children, birthdays, phone numbers, addresses, or the like. They’re too easy to guess.
And don’t leave passwords on notes next to your computer, Santerre advises. It may sound obvious but it’s a common issue.
Finally, Santerre suggests making sure that your password recovery information is up-to-date. After choosing a complex password, you may forget it, and you don’t want the password reset e-mail going to an abandoned e-mail account or to someone who might exploit the opportunity to hijack your account.
The “I’m Feeling Lucky” button is one of the very few things that stand out on Google’s minimalistic homepage.
Clicking the “I’m
feeling lucky” Button automatically takes you to the first search result and it’s helpful for navigational queries, when there’s a single good result (e.g.: [Yahoo Mail], [download Opera]) etc.
What’s the “I’m feeling lucky” Button at Google ?
“The reason it’s called ‘I’m
Feeling Lucky,’ is of course that’s a pretty damn ambitious goal. I mean to get the exact right one thing without even giving you a list of choices, and so you have to feel a little bit lucky if you’re going to try that with one go,” tried to explain Sergey Brin.
Even if only 1% from Google’s searches bypass the search results page and go straight to the top result, Google will keep the strange button on the homepage as it has become a part of its brand.
How Much Google Loses for “I’m feeling lucky” Button
Google cofounder Sergey Brin confirmed that around one percent of all Google searches go through the “I’m
Feeling Lucky” button. Because the button takes users directly to the top search result, Google doesn’t get to show search ads on one percent of all its searches. That costs the company around $110 million in annual revenue, according to Rapt’s Tom Chavez.
So why does Google keep such a costly button around ? “It’s possible to become too dry, too corporate, too much about making money. I think what’s delightful about ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ is that it reminds you there are real people here,” Google exec Marissa Mayer explained.
When your website first reaches a million visitors, it’s a great milestone. However, one billion views per day can only be attained by the selected few, and YouTube is now one of them.
According to the official blog, YouTube is serving “well over a billion views a day”. That’s at least 11,574 views per second, 694,444 views per minute, and 41,666,667 views per hour. Imagine the web server farm that can withstand that much traffic, and then remember that YouTube is just one of Google’s many properties.
YouTube still may not be making enough money to justify the 1.65 billion dollars Google has paid for it, but it definitely makes it up when it comes to visitors.
To celebrate the occasion, YouTube has a special logo today, accompanied with the text “1 billion views per day”. Yes, they’re bragging, but one has to admit they have a lot to brag about.
Between search engines and social media, there are a lot of different ways that people can get to your website. But which of these sources provides loyal users that come back to your site multiple times?
That’s the subject of a new study by ad network Chitika, who analyzed the browsing habits of 33 million unique users over the course of September.
According to their findings, Facebook provides the most loyal visitors, with 20% of those that originate from the social network in turn visiting the site they landed upon four or more times in a week. Among other social media sites, Digg traffic produced loyal users 16% of the time, while Twitter traffic was only good for 11% loyalty.
In the realm of search engines, Yahoo provides the most loyal visitors at 15%, followed by Google and Bing with around 12% each.
The finding that social sites provide stickier traffic isn’t surprising, but what implications do the loyalty rankings for Facebook, Digg, and Twitter have, if any? Perhaps that in the long-run, encouraging your visitors to share on Facebook might have the most value, even if it doesn’t provide the most short-term traffic.
That said, it’s easy enough to provide sharing options for a multitude of social media sites (case in point, this post!), so you can probably file this under the “nice to know” category of statistics and use your own analytics to gauge what is and isn’t working.
Google recently turned 11 years, and it’s hard to believe
Google is only 11. If you didn’t know few years back “googleit” became its own verb, meaning “to search for“. It’s also hard to imagine where we’d be without Google….
Top Google Products Which Changed Our Lives
Here are the Five Google Products we cannot live without it.
Google’s GMail
Without Gmail, we’d still rely on other free Webmail applications, many of them drenched in flashing advertisements and incapable of sorting out lots of spam with the efficiency and unobtrusiveness of Google. And Gmail, just recently out of beta, continuously improves, integrating Google’s many features into its streamlined interface. Sure, it goes down every once in a while; but we love it, so we cut it a break.
Documents – Docs
Google Docs changed the way people conduct business on the web. Morphing the capabilities of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint into free applications — and providing them as a collaborative experience with anyone on the Internet — was impetus for many to skip out on buying expensive Microsoft products.As an answer to Google’s battle cry, Microsoft shoved its Office suite up into the clouds, making it clear that
Google is stoking competition with its innovative approach to productivity.
Google Maps
MapQuest was once the be-all, end-all for Internet route mapping. But with
Google Maps and
Google Earth,
Google stole a share of the attention.
Google Maps never ceases to amaze me. Just recently it integrated Boston’s obnoxious public transit system into its directions, allowing us to find the quickest route via trolley, train or bus. Its use of walking directions was also a brilliant move for us city-dwellers who shun motor vehicles in favor of a good pair of sneakers.
Browsers – Chrome
I hate Internet Explorer. Firefox is too slow for me. That’s where
Google Chrome busts in like the Kool-Aid Man. Nimble, smooth, and reliable,
Google Chrome has permanently replaced the alternatives. Like all of Google’s
products, Chrome is constantly under development, and its most recent beta reinforces its role as a strong contender in the browser wars, especially since Sony is preinstalling it on laptops.
Books
Google found itself in a quandary after scanning millions of rare and out-of-print books, getting sued, finding a settlement, and then watching that settlement scuttle back to the drawing board. Once the project is completed, people will be able to access millions of books from all over and enjoy what, in some cases, has been lost for years.
Also Best Free eBooks to Improve your Blogging, Traffic & Social Media
Well there are others
products like news, adsense (earning money from ads), trends, googlepages(removed), sketchup (3-D modeling program), Street View and
Google Alerts. Let me know If I missed any.
How Google is Going to Change Lives is the Coming Years
Google Chrome OS
Yep, this one will probably go on some historical timeline in a tech museum someday.
Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight Operating system that will initially be targeted at Netbooks. Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of
Google Chrome OS. Again
Google benefits as well by having happier users who are more likely to spend time on the Internet.
Google Wave
Wave is designed to be a ground-up reinvention of the way we communicate and collaborate. Think instant messaging, but with the open platform potential for plugging in Twitter and other methods of communication, too. It is currently being launched and I suspect that it will change the way bloggers write their blogs, and the way that blog readers read the content and interact with the readers.