Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Recently I mentioned Facebooks great walls are holding back garbage, with regards to a must read Wired article titled Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network’s Plan to Dominate the Internet — and Keep Google Out.
Facebook’s personalized search, widely accepted as their best path towards maximum monetization, is becoming increasingly less relevant as our real social connections, both online and off, now have the ability to rise to the top of the most coveted spot online; Our search results page. Google Social Search is a just launched, opt-in experiment within Google labs.
“It’s strongly connected to Google Profiles and Gmail. For example, if you add a link to your Twitter page on your Google profile, Google will find the people you follow and the content they produce: blogs, photo albums, videos, reviews. If your query returns useful results from your social connections, Google will display the results at the bottom of the search results pages.” Also Included in your search results are items from your Google Reader subscriptions and websites, public profiles, and other content linked to from your friends’ profiles.
Social search includes results from the public connections of your immediate circle of friends. In other words, friends of friends are counted as members of your social search. Think of them as ‘friend of a friend’ recommendations that take place in the real world more often than we may realize. Your trusted sources are also being included in your social circle via the content you’ve chose to subscribe to in Google Reader.
What makes Google’s approach to personalized, or social search, more relevant than Facebook’s is that Google is using content of a much higher value. Content that your immediate circle and extended circle are creating and trusting on the rest of the internet. Add this wide network to your search and you’re looking at seemingly limitless, very high value, and pretty damn relevant, search results.
Posted in interweb, tech / 2 Comments
Friday, October 23, 2009
Apple has patented CSS transforms and CSS animation properties! Since Apple has decided to not support the latest unified Flash Player this would make it seem they’re going their own route with the mega popular iPhone. Wow, this is pretty darn ballsy. I wonder the implications this will have on webkit and non-webkit based browsers alike, and of course, the future of Flash on the mobile platform. This will certainly garner the attention of big media in the near future. For now it’s low on the radar. | View an example of CSS animation and CSS transforms if you’re using a recent build of Google Chrome or Safari.
The Awesomeness Manifesto made the Twitter rounds a couple of months ago. I’m ready to talk about it now: Point taken, innovation should include “Ethical production, Insanely great stuff, Love and Real Value”. But to apply overarching economic theory to such low levels of the goods and services creation process is kinda silly. Re-branding “innovation” as “awesomeness” adds very little value, in my opinion.
Nice Flickr photostream | I adore these bookshelves, just as soon as my baby girl’s balance improves and the square footage of our apartment increases. | Google PowerMeter’s first device partner – Making Google Power available to everyone, currently on backorder. | The flu is really only a problem if you watch cable news, right? Have a look at Google’s Flu Trends. Legitimate concern, or is the tail wagging the dog? | The illustrations of Meg Hunt | James Bond squirrel- Mission Peanuts | ualuealuealeuale | How to use tabs in Google Chrome
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Fortune Magazine’s Why business loves Charlie Rose and some interesting words from the article: affectation: a deliberate pretense or exaggerated display. primacy: the state of being first in importance. protean: Exceedingly variable; readily assuming different shapes or forms. seriatim: in a series; one after another. canard: a deliberately misleading fabrication. | The banner image comes from the set of Holga images taken by Susan and myself during last summer’s cross country move.
Posted in california, cross country, link, movie / tv / Leave a Comment
Monday, October 19, 2009
“Looking for design in the Supermarket (as opposed to a specialty retailer like Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s) is a bit like bird-watching indoors. To end up here, Design ideas need to trickle down well past the middle-brow and survive extreme pressures of low margins and fast turn.” | Amazon Introduces same day delivery | Google launches Fetch as Googlebot within webmaster tools | I need a firplace for these Burning Cities Firescreens.
Posted in design, link / Leave a Comment
Thursday, October 15, 2009
A few months ago Wired Magazine wrote a piece about the potential of Facebook surpassing Google search in Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network’s Plan to Dominate the Internet — and Keep Google Out. Their largest argument to make this point:
“At press time, [Facebook] was also planning to launch Facebook Search, allowing users to scour one another’s feeds. Want to see what some anonymous schmuck thought about the Battlestar Galactica finale? Check out Google. Want to see what your friends had to say? Try Facebook Search.”
The future of search most assuredly involves your network of friends, family & peers, but the spot for that search will not be Facebook. Their largest hurdle is that Facebooks Great Wall is holding back a Great Mound of useless garbage.
I’m convinced that the content within Facebook will never rise to a level of usability required to dominate the internet in the fashion Wired believes. Facebook, or someone else specializing in this type of content will always thrive, but will remain as they are today; a completely separate, much less useful version of some other kind of web.
Posted in interweb, tech / 6 Comments
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Some fantastic walks in New York are coming up for the week of October 18-24, including “Sustainable Skyscrapers: Times Square Goes Green”… learn about the reactive interiors and intelligent materials that make up the Bank of America Tower and six more of the city’s greenest buildings. | Some Lectures of interest are taking place soon at SVA, including Jason Fried (37Signals), Callie Neylan (NPR) and Matt Mullenweg (WordPress), amongst others.
Over 1,860 issues, covering the years from 1936 to 1972 of Life Magazine are now available on Google Books. Get started by selecting a thumbnail from the thumbnails of every Life Magazine available. Dig into an individual magazine via scans of each page. More details on the Google Books blog. Google Books, Making printed material collections less relevant by the minute. Well, more relevant.
Posted in happenings, interweb, nyc / 3 Comments
Monday, October 12, 2009
2006 Feature Photography Pulitzer Prize winner Todd Heisler | During the late 1950′s and early 1960′s when the Cold War was escalating, the U.S. government built hundreds of Atlas-F missile silos to prepare the country for an attack that never came. Today, most of these silos lie abandoned and filled with water, monuments to a bygone era of American history and left to waste. But now, thanks to two entrepreneurial cousins, Bruce Francisco and Gregory Gibbons, one of these silos located in beautiful Adirondack State Park near Lake Placid is finding new life as a luxury home safe haven getaway complex accessible by plane or car. | Touted as the first positive energy office structure, Elithis Tower, Dijon, France creates more power than it uses and produces six times less greenhouse gas emissions than classic commercial buildings. | Photoshop app now on your iPhone, video review
Posted in interweb / Leave a Comment
Thursday, October 08, 2009
The Cost Conundrum in June 1, 2009 issue of The New Yorker takes a look at why McAllen, Texas is one of the most expensive healthcare markets in the country. Medicare spent $15,000 per enrollee here, almost twice the national average. Atul Gawande looks at the possible reasons for such high costs from every conceivable angle. Obesity? Alcoholism? Fabulous care? Overuse? Misuse? Turns out, none of the above. Gawande has created an eye opening read we all should take in.
“The more money Medicare spent per person in a given state the lower that state’s quality ranking tended to be. In fact, the four states with the highest levels of spending—Louisiana, Texas, California, and Florida—were near the bottom of the national rankings on the quality of patient care.” (infographic: the Quality of Care VS the Cost of Medicare)
Unrelated to healthcare but still interesting: Dallas Clayton’s An Awesome Book is just that. | People reading at Barnes and Noble from Every Person in NY | Friends of Type
Posted in interweb / 3 Comments
Tuesday, October 06, 2009
Today’s update comes from me spending lots of time on Things Magazine. I love the site and their approach to discussing, pointing out, shouting about, whispering quietly amongst themselves, today’s potentially cluttered online culture. Sometimes they expound, sometimes they don’t. It’s art with some noise, noise with some meaning or even none at all. So I’ve borrowed heavily. It’s one of the few sites I leave Google Reader to read. Jammed in among popular noise makers, few sites demand such attention. There’s a couple of random patterns in use with these updated styles, the newest from Pattern Foundry and a squiggly lines pattern of my own creation which has stuck around.
Posted in code, design, interweb / Leave a Comment
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
There’s a great article in the September 2009 National Geographic titled Plugging Into the Sun by George Johnson.
The total power needs of the humans on Earth is approximately 16 terawatts… The sunsunshine on the solid part of the Earth is 120,000 terawatts. Energy from the sun is virtually unlimited.
The first solar revolution 30 years ago fizzled, but at some point this stuff has got to stick.
Posted in interweb / Leave a Comment
Powered by WordPress using the Minimal, Really Theme. Inspired by Things
- Set of iPhone wallpapers / Download (.zip)