netParticles - News & Reports

Google Valentine's Day Card Received with $100 AdWords Coupon Code!

Richard Tea — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 04:20:28 +0000

Today, we received a Valentine's Day card from Google! With a $100 AdWords Coupon and a QR Code!

It seemed to have been sent to Canadian AdSense Publishers judging from the generic salutation on the envelope and a quick search on Twitter. Google has decided to show some love with this little card which includes a CAD$100 AdWords coupon code which will depreciate into a CAD$75 one the 5th of March to finally expire on March 31st 2010. To get started, the card and the QR Code leads us to www.google.ca/ads/abondance ("abondance" for abundance in English)

Google Unveils Google "Caffeine": Improves Search Indexing, Speed and Accurary

Richard Tea — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 07:00:00 +0000

In response to the new threats in the search industry from Facebook's real-time search, Twitter Search and Bing, Google has unveiled a secret project they worked on for some time: A next-generation search engine.

For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search. It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits "under the hood" of Google's search engine, which means that most users won't notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we're opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.

Although some sites such as Mashable claim to test several aspects of this Google 2.0 (if we can call it this way) but only received criticism for over-analysis. As Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer at Google mentioned on his blog, the main focus is the back-end code:

Facebook Acquires FriendFeed

Richard Tea — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 19:27:53 +0000

TechCrunch has a preliminary report that Facebook has acquired FriendFeed:

Facebook has acquired FriendFeed, we’ve learned. We’re gathering details now. At this point details on the acquisition are still very sparse, but it’s clearly a good match. Over the last year or so, Facebook has “borrowed” quite a few of features that FriendFeed popularized, including the ‘Like’ feature and an emphasis on real-time news updates.

This is a very strategic move for Facebook since it will complement their current set of features and take a step towards the "real-time web". Facebook just issued the following press release:

100,000 Invitations to Google Wave on September 30th

Richard Tea — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 11:30:34 +0000

On Monday morning, Google has announced that 100,000 invitations to Google Wave will be sent on September 30th. Announced on May 28th at the Google I/O Conference, Google Wave will be a game-changer or that might replace email over time. But as Mashable reports:

"While it looks and feels like email in many ways, its unique hybrid of realtime and message-based communication takes some getting used to. Using applications in-wave, editing other people’s messages, and integrating robots into your conversations are going to confuse and even scare people."

So signup to be notified when it is ready before it is too late.

Twitter's Strategy Leaked, Could They Crowdsource their Strategy 2.0?

Richard Tea — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 21:53:35 +0000

On Tuesday evening, TechCrunch received over 300 confidential Twitter documents and screenshots. Today they claim they have come to an agreement with Twitter to publish their internal strategy. I will not rehash the Twitter Internal Strategy here and I have already tweeted about this the moment it happened. From the Twitter's blog, they are now really more open than they (ever) wanted to.

Google Reader Social Update, A Step Towards Google Wave?

Richard Tea — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 06:24:02 +0000

Over the last year, Google has been receiving increased pressure to become a real-time search engine, something like Technorati and Twitter. They certainly have the lead in public content search (and advertising) over the Internet but a threatening amount of private and user information have started to surface behind the great wall of Facebook. Research publications strongly people often rely on word of mouth or recommendations from other people to make their decisions. Although, Google's core strength is search (and lots of math), there is a lot of progress to be done on the social front.

A few hours ago and as reported by TechCrunch and Mashable, Google Reader received a significant upgrade which allowed following, liking and people searching. You are not the only one to automatically see the link to Twitter and Facebook. However, they seem to have set the default sharing method to public while offering the option of sharing only between friends. In the past they have enabled a feature that allowed sharing but was unfortunately set to share by default to selected groups which may not have granted the best success.

A few points of criticism can already be made:

New Social Media Study: Majority Cannot Live Without Social Networks

Richard Tea — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 09:00:00 +0000

Could you survive without your social networks? (Facebook? Twitter? LinkedIn? MySpace!?)

Tom H. C. Anderson, managing partner at Anderson Analytics, shared the result of their May survey of 5,000 U.S. social media users which attempts to answer this (the answer is: mainly no). Without reposting the entire article, here is a summarized outline:

Percentage of respondents could probably do without:
- Facebook (29%)
- MySpace (35%)
- Twitter (43%)
On the most valuable network (the report is not clear on how it was calculated since the sum is over 100%)
- Facebook (75%)
- MySpace (65%)
- LinkedIn (30%)
- Twitter (12%)
Usage and reliance on social networks
- Under 35, for "fun" and contacting friends
- Older, indispensable for staying in touch with family and close friends