| And Speaking of Different Approaches |
|
Here’s another UI difference between Google and Bing. Bing’s introduced Streetside view — their answer to Google’s Street View — for more than 50 U.S. metro areas. But you have to install Silverlight to use it. I know I’m being cranky here, but I don’t want to load a whole bunch of crap on my laptop if I can avoid it. Google Maps didn’t make me do that. |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
|
Comments (1)| Google’s Fading. Fading In, That Is. |
|
Google’s launched a new version of its home page, which displays only the logo, the search box, and the buttons. All the other fru-fru — and there wasn’t very much of it to begin with — fades in when you move the mouse. When you compare that with Bing’s home page, which today is featuring an image of the Georgia Aquarium and a Zebra Shark, you’re seeing 2 different user interface approaches. Though I like a lot of Bing’s UI touches — the “more info” link for each hit, the advanced search options that open at the top of the results page instead of in a new page, the “show similar images” feature and the video pre-play, to name a few — I really don’t want to be distracted by shiny objects when I’m about to do a search. |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
|
November 23, 2009
| Microsoft Attacks. Google Responds With Zen. |
|
Microsoft has offered to pay News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, and other publishers to block their content from Google. This is an effort to make Google cough up cash for news content as well, thus reducing its profit margins. And it also fits nicely with Rupert Murdoch’s world-view, to boot. Google is unperturbed. It knows that news stories, once posted, become available everywhere, even from Twitter. As the haiku error message says: The Web site you seek |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
|
October 23, 2009
| Twitter Finally Comes Up With a Business Plan |
|
They’re selling access to their stream of Tweets to Bing and Google. Bing announced it first and even has a test version of Bing Twitter — Now *that’s* a catchy name! — available for us to play with. About 3 hours later, Google said “Me, too!” However, we’ll have to wait to see how the Big G will integrate Tweets into search. One more thing: Facebook also signed a deal with Bing to provide access to public updates from Facebook users, but it didn’t seem to register much with the blogosphere. And no wonder — how many people make their Facebook updates public? One more thing, one more time. Google’s Marissa Mayer also announced an upcoming “Social Search” service. Does the world need another social search service? I don’t think so. |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
|
October 6, 2009
| Almost As Dumb As Trying To Blackmail Letterman |
|
Last week a list of more than 10,000 Hotmail passwords was posted on the pastebin.com Website. Yesterday the BBC reported that the list is now up to 30,000 passwords, and also includes credentials from AOL, Gmail, and Yahoo Mail. How did the perps get the passwords? In a word, phishing. Moral of the story: don’t click on links in emails unless you’re absolutely, positively sure where you’re going to end up. It’s dumb dumb dumb to just click and hope. (I spent 1 1/2 hours last Saturday cleaning up the PC belonging to a serial clicker that I know. What fun.) One obvious use for stolen email accounts is to generate spam. And, if you have the resources, you can comb through the emails in the compromised accounts looking for credit card numbers, passwords to other services, and other bits of personal information. But there’s yet another angle. People reuse passwords. It’s human nature — we have trouble cramming multiple passwords to different services into our brains. So if I somehow capture your Gmail credentials, I’m gonna try them on every Website I can think of, especially retailers such as Amazon, L.L. Bean, Sears, whatever. If you’ve saved your credit card number with any of them, I’m gonna go on a shopping expedition. I’m speaking hypothetically, you understand. Anyway, here are some security tips I posted around this time last year. (What goes around comes around, eh?) I cover these, and more stuff, in our Internet Ethics CLE class. |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
|
September 29, 2009
| Loss of Web Search Ecosystem |
|
Last night I was searching for “fatty paycheck”. (*See below for an explanation of the query.) I was looking for a page I remembered viewing that had “pimp” in the URL. It wasn’t in the top 50 hits from Google. Hmm … was the page gone? No — a quick Yahoo search easily turned it up in the top 10 hits. See, this is what bothers me about Yahoo selling out to Microsoft — it’s the loss of Web search ecosystem. I often find stuff via Yahoo that I don’t with Google. Next year that won’t matter anymore. There’ll be 2 choices: Google or Bing. And speaking of Bing, my page was hit #48 there. So they were marginally better than Google. *Fatty paycheck: Back in March 2009 a young woman was offered a job at Cisco. She Tweeted about it sarcastically, saying, “Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.” About an hour later a Cisco employee replied “Who is the hiring manager? I’m sure they would love to know that you would hate the work. We here at Cisco are well versed in the Web.” End of job offer. Much Internet scorn was heaped upon the fatty paycheck Tweeter. |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
|
September 21, 2009
| Recap of Events, September 14-18 |
|
Skype Founders File Copyright Suit Against eBay Amazon Releases Kindle Source Code Google Aims to Wrest Display Ads From Yahoo Government Urges Changes to Google Books Deal Bing Passes 10% Market Share, Nielsen Says 300 Million and On Facebook Settles Class-Action Suit Over Beacon Service (WSJ, sub required) Twitter Closing New Venture Round At $1 Billion Valuation |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
|
July 29, 2009
| The Montagues and Capulets Have Finally Gotten Together |
|
We thought it was cute when they flirted. We shed tears when they had a very public breakup. We worried when one of them wanted to date somebody else. And now, joy — as rumored 2 weeks ago, Romeo (Microsoft) and Juliet (Yahoo) have finally tied the knot. So will they live happily ever after? Sort of — it’s a 10 year deal, which is like forever in Internet Years. Microsoft will license Yahoo’s search technology so that it can use it in Bing. Bing, however, will be the official search engine for both Microsoft and Yahoo. So Yahoo Search is going away. No dowry for either Romeo of Juliet — they’re going to share revenue. This is a good deal for Microsoft, because its search division lost a million dollars last quarter. The happy couple now account for a bit less than 30% of the search engine market — less than half the size of Google’s share. But they’re finally together and we wish them well. |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
|
July 24, 2009
| Microsoft Didn’t Do So Hot Last Quarter |
|
So Apple had some problems last quarter. Microsoft’s were worse: revenue down 17%, income down 29%. I know you can construct an explanation containing the words “recession”, “business spending”, “Vista”, and “netbooks” to rationalize this. Fine. But this snippet from TechCrunch got my attention: “Every [Microsoft] business got hit hard, but the worst-performing business by far was the online business. It had the biggest operating loss of $732 million, which was $1 million more than its revenues of $731 million. That means that every dollar of online revenue was wiped out by a dollar of operating loss. And those operating losses really stack up. For its fiscal year (which ended in June), the online business showed an operating loss of $2.2 billion, nearly twice as much as the year before. Despite the much-ballyhooed launch of Bing, search revenue was flat in the quarter was flat. You’ve got to wonder how much of the ballooning operating loss is going into Bing, and whether those investments will ever pan out.” Yup … you gotta wonder how much longer before they panic and throw a lot of cash at Yahoo. |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
|
July 17, 2009
| I’ll Believe It When I See It |
|
Apparently Microsoft and Yahoo are close to an agreement to work together. This soap opera’s been playing out for a long time, so I’m skeptical. However, BoomTown’s Kara Swisher quotes someone as saying, “It is down to the short strokes, for sure, it is just a question if we can finally close this.” Here’s how the deal would work, according to Swisher: “While BoomTown has gotten several different versions of terms of the latest deal, they all include Microsoft (MSFT) paying Yahoo (YHOO) several billion dollars upfront to take over its search advertising business and guarantee certain payments back to Yahoo. There is also a display advertising element to the deal, which would likely have Yahoo take the lead in selling premium advertising for the companies.” Yahoo and Microsoft are meeting today. If the deal gets done, it’ll be announced next week. |
|
|
Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
|
RSS