Archive for August, 2009

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Facebook starts New Search Rollout

Friday, August 21st, 2009

Facebook seems to find out that there’s a need for their site’s search tab to be improved. Yes, the leading social networking site’s search tab is too lousy for it only provides limited options. Though in the beginning, this is not really a subject to be improved on Facebook’s site but as the site’s growing number of users and applications, expansion of its services should also be taken care of.

Last August 10, 2009, Facebook said that they are going to roll out Facebook Search to all of its users. Previously, it was announced that this will be randomly selected to its users for some testing. But now, Facebook explained on its blog that from now on, users can look for their friends and their own status updates, photos, links, videos and notes for the past 30 days. This is also applicable to subjects you wanted to search on your Facebook pages which you’re a fan. For those who decided to provide their contents available to public, users can also access for those. Also, people’s profiles and related Facebook Pages, groups and applications will still be part of the search results.

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Introducing Caffeine: Google’s New Search Index

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

If Microsoft was able to re-launched their search engine as Bing nowadays which is most likely to be user-interface related in most of its changes, Google announced its ‘secret project’ Caffeine which includes infrastructure-related changes but no user-interface. In a way, Caffeine affected Google’s user-interface as its infrastructure is new.

This Caffeine is considered to be the ‘next-generation architecture for Google’s web search.’ It includes changes in crawling, indexing and ranking pages though Google says that the new architecture is primarily changed based in how they index.

Google said that they are not trying to integrate this new architecture on the current one; this is a developer preview where webmasters and power searchers can experiment and provide some feedbacks. But compared to the defunct Google’s SearchMash which was also intended for experiments, Caffeine will soon replace the existing Google architecture.

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FriendFeed is now with Facebook

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

To continue dominate the world of social networking, Facebook is looking for some areas where they could maintain its stability. This is primary the reason why Facebook tried buying the popular micro-blogging tool Twitter which remarkably becoming their company to compete over MySpace. Unfortunately, Twitter rejected the offer.

But trying their luck with similar tool, FriendFeed agreed to Facebook thus, taking 12 of its employees to join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders to take ‘senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.’

Though Facebook is becoming a Twitter-like recently, both companies who are competing for social site supremacy are still different in many ways.

The Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed will certainly make the first find more stability on its current status as the world’s most used networking site.

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YouTube announced New Masthead Design

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009

YouTube finally did a new change on its website. As currently, the world’s second most used search engine and one of the most popular sites, YouTube came up a new masthead design more appealing to its users and is practically showcasing the site’s capabilities.

YouTube announced last August 13, 2009 that the site has a new masthead which is obviously resembles with Google. Aside from the logo, it has the large search box, and a few helpful navigational text links. With this new design, YouTube puts bigger emphasis with the site’s search capabilities – a decision that will make its users maximize the site for their own purpose.

Also, YouTube is planning to do some experiments on the site which will give more power to its users. According to YouTube, in the near future, they will be releasing controls for the users to personalize the masthead.

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Facebook to Earn more Dollars

Monday, August 17th, 2009

Facebook is planning to provide more dollar-earning projects within their own social networking site. Aside from the regular ads users can see on its site, there will be contextually targeted ads. This will be presented to the advertisers.

Of course, Facebook is well-positioned to do these aggressive advertisement. With its millions of users who spend a lot of time in the site, placing contextual ads will be a good step to earn dollars with these users.

Facebook is also concerned with the cookies and other spams that would affect its users that’s why they will continue to test every project before releasing it to everybody.

The targeted market will be based on the member’s profiles themselves. This will be based with the user’s status updates, fan pages and other related pages where advertisers can put their contextual ads.

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Images in Search Engines are Important says Google, Mircosoft

Sunday, August 16th, 2009

With the billions of cellphones with cameras being sold every year, pictures are considered today no longer as something nice to have but a must to have. People eventually consider these pictures as important information same to documents. And today, with the evolution of technology on various camera-enabled phones, pictures have to be in good quality.

Two of the top internet leaders – Google and Microsoft – agreed in their studies that images take an important part in search engine nowadays as more and more consumers rely on pictures when doing their searches online.

With the result of the study, Google started to rank images according to their quality. This will help searchers find an accurate image of what they’re looking for. Also, Google considers this step as a tool in building next-generation websites.

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How One Business Learns How Powerful Social Sites Are

Saturday, August 15th, 2009

Business is business after all. And as establishments are pushing for a more stable community online, marketing analysts of various businesses are promoting their own products and services online with their consumers signing up, following up on Facebook or Twitter and other social media sites.

And to continue making their online consumer community as much as possible a concrete community of loyal users, these establishments are using these social sites to market promotions and discounts. However, it’s a fail that some are not yet aware of the powerful capacity of social sites to gather people.

Baja Fresh Mexican Grill recently got problems with the promotion they take hold on Facebook as they offer a free burrito with the regular purchase of a regular-size drink. This promotion generated 50,000 takers. Unfortunately, Baja Fresh wasn’t able to accommodate the number of consumers who participated in the promotion.

With a number of consumers overreacting on the service they got from the promotion, Baja Fresh released their post-promotion press release acknowledging the people who made the promotion a success and apologizing for whatever it provided them unsatisfied service.

The company said that they will continue market Baja Fresh to all the followers on Twitters and fans on Facebook and will take the experience a learning memory for their company.

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Google’s CEO, Schmidt, quits Apple’s Board post

Saturday, August 15th, 2009

Due to some conflicts of interest as Google is entering Apple’s line of business, Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, resigned for being one of Apple’s board of directors as Apple, Inc. announced on August 3, 2009.

According to the statement released by Apple, Inc., ‘Eric has been an excellent Board member for Apple’ but since Google is doing direct competition with Apple’s main business, ‘Eric’s effectiveness as board member will be significantly diminished.’ Adding that, ‘we have mutually decided that now is the right time for Eric to resign his position on Apple’s Board.’

We all know that recently, Google released its own operating system for mobile – the Android, and then the browser and the PC operating system, these new products of Google directly affects Apple’s own products. Thus, Eric’s resignation to Apple is just the right thing for can’t handle two different companies that are rivals in nature.

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Google’s unending War vs Apple

Friday, August 14th, 2009

Once again, Apple slammed Google on latter’s suggestion to include Google Voice app on Apple Store.

Apple just blocked the search giant’s Skype-like service on its Apple Store though this application is currently available on rival phones – Androids and Blackberry smartphones – that are on an invite-only status.

According to reports, this is similar to what Apple did to Skype as the first limiting the accessibility of the latter from 3G network to WiFi availability only. This action receives various consumer criticisms. But this step is practically because Apple’s wireless carrier partner is AT&T which receives the direct disadvantage of allowing Skype to be openly available on iPhones.

The competition between Google, Apple, AT&T, Skype and other companies who are launching their products and services to be available on competitor’s users is being criticized by the consumer advocates who want these companies tied up for certain projects for the benefits of its users.

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Google tops Most Valuable Global Brands ‘09

Friday, August 14th, 2009

Just as Google lead the internet generation with its services online, once again, as Millward Brown released the top ‘BrandZ’ report for this year, the company remains on the top spot!

Google, as the report says, has increased by 16% in terms of brand value which in numbers came to be as $86 billion last year then up to $100 billion this year.

In comparison with its rival, Yahoo! ranks at the 81st spot. According to reports, Yahoo!’s value also decreased by 31% compared to last year. In numbers, Yahoo! valued at $7 billion.

On the other hand, Microsoft ranks second to Google with an increase of 8% from last year. Microsoft valued at $76 billion.

Other brands included on the report’s Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands of 2009 are (from third spot to tenth) Coca-Cola (16% brand value), IBM (20%), McDonald’s (34%), Apple (14%), China Mobile (7%), GE (-16%), Vodofone (45%) and Marlboro (33%).

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