A New Social Google Service?
There’s a lot of speculation about a new Google service called “Google Me” that is supposed to compete with Facebook. Most likely, the service will expand the already existing profiles and activity streams, while adding support for social apps.
Wall Street Journal reports that Google has been in discussion with companies that develop social games for Facebook. “Google is in talks with several makers of popular online games as it seeks to develop a broader social-networking service that could compete with Facebook, according to people familiar with the matter.”
Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, said that “the world doesn’t need a copy of the same thing”, suggesting that Google won’t try to imitate Facebook. It’s clear that Google hasn’t anticipated Facebook’s success, placed losing bets and efforts like OpenSocial couldn’t save Facebook’s competitors from extinction.
Now that people spend a lot of time online using Facebook and find information filtered by their friends, even Google’s search engine can become less useful. A lot of information is trapped inside Facebook: social connections, status messages, discussions and Google can’t use most of the data to improve the relevance of search results.
Google has been more concerned with creating open standards for building social apps, for delivering real-time notifications, for public preferences, aggregating social graph data, but it didn’t manage to build a coherent user experience that links all these pieces.
More About Google’s Experiments
A new Google paper gives more information about Google’s experiments. Google tests many new features on a subset of users and that’s the reason why you may see a different Google search interface, a new background color for Google ads or more Google search results.
At Google, experimentation is practically a mantra; we evaluate almost every change that potentially affects what our users experience. Such changes include not only obvious user-visible changes such as modifications to a user interface, but also more subtle changes such as different machine learning algorithms that might affect ranking or content selection. (…)
An experiment in web search diverts some subset of the incoming queries to an alternate processing path and potentially changes what is served to the user. (…) In addition to specifying how serving is changed via alternate parameter values, experiments must also specify what subset of traffic is diverted. One easy way to do experiment diversion is random traffic, which is effectively flipping a coin on every incoming query. One issue with random traffic experiment diversion is that if the experiment is a user-visible change (e.g., changing the background color), the queries from a single user may pop in and pop out of the experiment (e.g., toggle between yellow and pink), which can be disorienting. Thus, a common mechanism used in web experimentation is to use the cookie as the basis of diversion; cookies are used by web sites to track unique users. In reality, cookies are machine/browser specific and easily cleared; thus, while a cookie does not correspond to a user, it can be used to provide a consistent user experience over successive queries. For experiment diversion, we do not divert on individual cookies, but rather a cookie mod: given a numeric representation of a cookie, take that number modulo 1000, and all cookies whose mod equals 42, for example, would be grouped together for experiment diversion. Assuming cookie assignment is random, any cookie mod should be equivalent to any other cookie mod.
That’s probably the reason why you can “opt-out” from an experiment by clearing Google cookies.
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What to search when you’re expecting
Having been a new dad for six months now, I’ve quickly come to learn two valuable parenting lessons. First, being a father is truly a full-time job—and second, sleep is completely overrated. Whether buying the latest bottles, binkies, blankets and bibs, or just blogging about the whole magical journey, becoming a father has been the most invigorating and moving experience of my lifetime.
This week, I’m excited to help introduce our latest search story, New Baby. The video really captures the joys (and costs!) of becoming a new parent. I’d like to share my heart-felt compassion with new dads everywhere (and of course, my wife and the other mothers out there who are the true heroes.) We will all rest when they head off to college—in the meantime, enjoy!
Posted by Murali Viswanathan
Alex Trebek, teachers and Googlers unite at the Google Geo Teachers Institute
Google hosted its first Geo Teachers Institute, an intensive two-day workshop in which 150 educators received hands-on training and experience with Google Maps, Google SketchUp and Google Earth, including features like Mars, Moon and SkyMaps. Attendees from around the globe not only learned how these products work, but also discovered tips and resources for introducing these tools to students and using them to conceptualize, visualize, share and communicate about the world around them. Through this event, teachers were hopefully inspired to bring the world’s geographic information to students in compelling, fresh and fun ways.
As part of our continued effort to collaborate with teachers and help students get a better sense of places across the globe, we also announced that Google Earth Pro is now available to educators for free through the Google Earth for Educators site. Educators from higher educational and academic institutions who demonstrate a need for the Pro features in their classrooms can now apply for single licenses for themselves or site licenses for their computer labs. A similar program exists for SketchUp Pro through the Google SketchUp Pro Statewide License Grant, which is currently being provided via grants to 11 states, and available to all others at the K-12 level at no cost.
In conjunction with these exciting Geo-related events and announcements, the Geo Education team also thought it’d be timely and fun to test Googlers’ geographic knowledge by hosting the company’s first ever Google Geo Bee. With help from National Geographic, 68 teams relived their school years and took a written geography exam, competing for a spot on stage with Alex Trebek, who hosted the main event. The competition was based on the group version of the National Geographic Bee for students, which Google has sponsored for the past two years. Questions included those like “Which country contains most of the Balkan Mountains, which mark the boundary between the historical regions of Thrace and Moesia?” and “Ben Nevis, the highest peak in the United Kingdom, is located in which mountain chain?”
The final three Google teams (the Tea-Drinking Imperialists, the Geoids and the Titans) all showed off their geographic literacy and answered a plethora of diverse and complex questions. In the end, it was the Tea-Drinkers who emerged the winners when they figured out that Mecca was the answer to the clue, “Due to this city’s location on a desert trading route, many residents were merchants, the most famous of whom was born around A.D. 570.” And they didn’t just walk away with bragging rights; thanks to Sven Linblad from Linblad Expeditions, they also won an amazing adventure trip to either the Arctic, the Galapagos or Antarctica.
Through all of these education efforts — for teachers, students and grown-up Googlers alike — we hope people of all ages never stop exploring.
Posted by Tina Ornduff
EDA TECH FORUM INDIA Delivering the Latest in 10X Design Improvements
Two Locations:
Bangalore- Wednesday, August 18, 2010
New Delhi – Friday, August 20, 2010
8:00 – 17:50
Join other EE designers and engineers at one of two complimentary EDA Tech Forums in India – Bangalore and New Delhi. This year’s event series features a new lineup of speakers, sponsors, and technology tracks in a one-day event that provides an excellent mix of educational and networking opportunities.
Create your personal agenda with tracks in:
- Maximizing Front-end Design: From ESL through RTL
- Accelerate Time to Manufacturing
- Increase Productivity in System-level Design
- Innovations in Embedded Software and User Interface Development
Start the day with exciting keynote speakers, like Pamela Kumar of IBM, Manjunath Hebbar of HCL Technologies, and Pravin Madhani of Mentor Graphics as he discusses how in the next five years, 10X improvements in design methodologies are needed. After attending in-depth technical breakout sessions, there will also be plenty of time to meet with leading EDA solution providers in the multi-vendor fair.
Event Highlights:
- Attend in-depth technical sessions from sponsors
- Test drive new tools from EDA solution providers at the multi-vendor fair
- Enjoy great food and win prizes while you network with fellow EE designers
Guarantee your participation at the EDA Tech Forum. Register today.
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Google: Stargazing in Pittsburgh
Humans have always been fascinated by the night sky. And Googlers are no exception. Over the years, Google engineers have used their 20 percent time to create Google Sky, Moon, Mars and most recently Google Sky Map for Android. This handy app, built by engineers in our Pittsburgh office, turns your Android-powered phone into a live map of the night sky. You just point your phone to the sky and it gives you information about the stars and planets that you’re looking at. Since we introduced the app a year ago, Sky Map has been downloaded more than 5 million times.
On Sunday night we had a wonderful opportunity to share our passion for astronomy with our community in Pittsburgh at the Deep Sky Urban Star Party, held in the abandoned swimming pool at Leslie Park in Lawrenceville. We loaded up a bunch of Android phones with Sky Map and joined the Amateur Astronomers Association of Pittsburgh—who brought along their telescopes—and several hundred local residents for a night of stargazing.
As a Sky Map engineer the biggest thrill I get is when we get emails from people who have used our app to show a planet to their children for the first time. At the Star Party we were delighted to have the chance to show people around the night sky in person. It was great to meet so many people who were both excited by astronomy and interested in Google’s technology. Thanks for all of your ideas for new features, and a big thank you to the Leslie Park Pool Collective and all involved for organizing such a fun event.
Photos by Jason Parker-Burlingham
Posted by John Taylor
Convert WordPress Blog Into An iPad Native With PadPressed
PadPressed is a WordPress plugin that makes any WordPress blog look like a native iPad app when accessed from iPad. PadPressed bestows upon your humble blog the iPad features we’ve come to know and love such as “swipe to advance” articles, touch navigation, accelerometer positioning and home screen icon support when you’re really jonseing for that authentic app feeling.
Safari 5.0.1 Released With New Extensions
Apple this morning debuted Safari 5.0.1, switching the flip on Safari Extensions and formally introducing the Safari Extensions Gallery, a directory of available extensions across categories.
The company had introduced extensions support in Safari 5 last June, giving developers the opportunity to start creating browser add-ons using HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript standards.
Perhaps surprisingly, two fierce Apple competitors were given the opportunity to tout their extensions first and foremost, namely Amazon.com with their Wish List extension and Microsoft with their Bing Extension for Safari. Also featured in the press release: MLB.com, The New York Times and Twitter (eBay also gets featured on the Gallery site).
The new Safari Extensions Gallery is accessible straight from the browser menu or at extensions.apple.com. Users can download and install extensions from the gallery with a single click, and there’s no need to restart the browser (much like Google Chrome, and unlike Firefox).
I did a quick count and came out at above one hundred extensions already.
Add-ons can be automatically updated and are managed within Safari. Users can enable or disable individual extensions, or turn off all extensions with one click.
Every Safari Extension comes signed with a digital certificate from Apple to “prevent tampering” and to verify that updates to the extension are from the original developer. Safari Extensions are also sandboxed, which prevents them from accessing information on a user’s system or communicate with websites aside from those specified by the developer.
As Apple had made clear earlier, Safari Extensions run solely in the browser.
PayPal : Change in Withdrawal of Funds from PayPal Accounts for India Users
In accordance with regulatory instructions in India, Paypal to notifies its Uses about a change in the withdrawal functionality in India starting on August 1, 2010. At present you can request for either an electronic or cheque withdrawal of funds from your PayPal account if you are an India user.
From July 29, 2010 onwards, you will only be able to request for a cheque withdrawal of funds from your PayPal account.
To request for a cheque withdrawal:
- Log into your PayPal account, click on ‘Withdraw’.
- Click on the ‘Request a cheque from PayPal’ link.
- Enter the withdrawal amount and select your mailing address, then click ‘Continue’.
- Click ‘Submit’ to confirm your request.
In order to help with this change and until further notice, Paypal will refund the $5 USD cheque withdrawal fee to you for cheque withdrawals made on July 29, 2010 onwards.
For any questions, please log into your PayPal account and click ‘Contact Us’ at the bottom of the page.
Light summer reading: entertaining legal opinions
Last November, we added legal opinions to Google Scholar. Legal opinions consider serious issues and help refine the laws that govern our country—but they can also be surprisingly entertaining. We’ve shared some of these for your summer reading pleasure on the Google Scholar blog.
LeAnn Rimes A very rich and famous star Wasn't so rich in times afar But what a talent she had!
Read the rest on the Google Scholar blog.
Posted by Anurag Acharya
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