YouTube is pushing its Facebook Connect integration further by allowing its users to see the videos that their friends share on Facebook. YouTube users had previously been able to find their Facebook friends on YouTube as well as update their Facebook profile with their various actions from the site.
While it's nice to see YouTube embracing Facebook more and more, it stops a bit short of being an impressive Connect implementation. YouTube is getting there, but seems to be lagging behind a little in this department. An implementation that shares, on Facebook, what you are watching, on YouTube, would certainly make sense, although it might clutter up users' Facebook profiles if they are a prolific YouTube watcher. For now, the addition of this new feature is a welcome inclusion and serves as a great way of getting trusted recommendations for videos to watch on YouTube.
YouTube said this feature is in "test mode" for the time being. In my testing, I was not able to get this feature to actually work. This can be sometimes be expected while YouTube irons out the kinks with new features that aren't quite ready for prime time. If anyone has better luck, let us know in the comments.
Google Labs is testing a new way of viewing images that it is calling Image Swirl. When you search for a term in Image Swirl, 12 different sets of related images appear.
For example, if you search for "Kentucky," you will get sets of Kentucky state maps, Kentucky flags, the Kentucky Derby, and various scenery of the state. As you drill down further into the results, you get to see more tightly refined sets of images based on what you choose.
A search for Paris' Arc de Triomphe on Google Image Swirl.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)Image Swirl's interface is very similar to Google's Wonder Wheel. It also employs Google's previously developed technology for finding similar images as well as facial recognition. This is definitely a smarter image search than what we are used to.
Unfortunately, Image Swirl is not available for all search terms currently. It is reserved for 200,000 terms (which auto-complete in the search box) that Google has deemed worthy of being included. The company did say, however, that it plans to add more queries to the list moving forward.
So what do you think? Is Image Swirl cool? Lame? Important? Irrelevant? Let us know in the comments.
(Credit:
Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing)
As you may remember, in Microsoft's most recent round of layoffs, the company laid off Director of Business Development Don Dodge. Dodge is very respected in the start-up community and tirelessly defended Microsoft's technologies at conferences and to developers during his time at the company. When he was let go, many people were shocked by the move and were watching intently to see who would pick him up. On Monday, Dodge announced on his blog that he will be joining Google in a similar capacity to his role at Microsoft.
Now, Dodge will focus on evangelizing Google's technologies and platforms, instead of Microsoft's, to the developer community. Dodge said that within 90 minutes of the news of his layoff becoming public, Vic Gundotra, Google's VP of engineering (who also came from Microsoft), contacted him about this job opportunity with the company. On his blog, Dodge claims that he has already switched over to Gmail, Google Apps, and Chrome from their Microsoft counterparts.
It's great to see that Dodge landed on his feet so quickly after being ousted from his position at Microsoft and he will likely be a great asset to Google in dealing with the developer community.
Google is notoriously slow and calculating about changing it the user interface of its services.
In fact, Google hasn't made any major changes to the look and feel of Google Maps since its launch in 2005.
On Friday, the company launched several refinements to Maps--the biggest changes to its look since launch. While you might not notice these changes immediately--unless you are a hardcore Google Maps user--they are designed to enhance the readability of the maps.
As seen above, the thick street outlines that can make maps harder to read have been eliminated.
Google describes the update here:
(L)ocal and arterial roads have been narrowed at medium zooms to improve legibility, and the overall colors have been optimized to be easier on the eye and conflict less with other things (such as traffic, transit lines and search results) that we overlay onto the map. Hybrid roads have gained a crisp outline to make them easier to follow, and the overall look is now closer to an augmented satellite view instead of a simple overlay.
This morning, Fred Wilson introduces us to one of Union Square Ventures' portfolio companies that is coming out of stealth and launching publicly. Tracked.com is a sort of re-imagining of a business information service that provides personalized information on businesses and the people associated with them.
The start-up is positioned to be a competitor to Google and Yahoo Finance, which are largely ticker-based, as well as user-driven information sites like CrunchBase, Wikipedia, and, to some extent, LinkedIn.
Conceived by Mike Yavonditte, formerly of Quigo, Tracked.com, of course, provides extensive information on ticker-based companies, including company financials, much like Google and Yahoo Finance do, but it's not just a stock service. Its strong point is that it also tracks privately held companies, gathering any available information on them. For all of these companies, Tracked shows a wealth of information and news as well as the people associated with the company, complete with fleshed out profiles on them as well.
Tracked helps you keep an eye on the companies and people that you find important in the business world. It has a completely customizable "My Tracker" section that allows you to pick what companies and people to watch. For public companies, it has more robust functionality than Google or Yahoo Finance. It even calls out a lot of interesting data like executive compensation. For example, you can view a list of the executives with the highest compensation in 2006. For private companies, Tracked might be the most extensive, publicly available database in existence (aside from Wikipedia) and it's sure to grow even more.
One thing that is notably different about Tracked as compared to Wikipedia or CrunchBase is that users cannot edit current entries or add new ones. This ensures that the data on Tracked is accurate since the team can check all of the data that comes in. The downside to this is that it cannot possibly include as much information as a user-driven site.
Overall, Tracked.com is a strong, customizable alternative that will pull some users away from Google and Yahoo Finance. It is a convenient and highly addictive way to browse through information on public and private businesses as well as people. The information is so extensive and interesting that you should plan to burn a couple of hours the first time that you check the site out.
You may notice that Tracked.com is operating a little slow right now with the surge of traffic from its launch. Hopefully, as they work out the kinks, performance will improve.
Here are some additional screenshots to give you a better idea of the site's functionality, but you should really just check it out yourself. ... Read more
The L.A. Times and now, Mashable are reporting that a security hole in Twitter allows protected tweets to be indexed by Google. After looking into the matter, we have determined that Google is not displaying protected tweets but rather indexing all public tweets, some from accounts that are now protected.
At first glance, there seems to be a hole in Twitter's protected tweet security, with the prime example being tweets, supposedly written by Bill Clinton showing up on the search engine. However, the tweets that appear here belong to "Fake Bill Clinton" from when he owned the @billclinton username and the account was private. One of the tweets that is indexed by Google under @billclinton can be found, migrated to @notbillclinton's account here.
A few of the "protected" Bill Clinton tweets.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)It appears that all Twitter users whose accounts have been protected since they opened them are in no danger of their tweets being indexed. It appears that if, at some point, the profile was public, then the tweets made during that time continue to live in Google's index.
This incident was definitely a scare for users with protected accounts who value their privacy on the site highly and have placed some degree of trust in Twitter to keep their tweets safe. Twitter has had some security concerns in the past, with a slew of their corporate documents being exposed and before that with several high-profile accounts being hacked. Since the "protected tweets exposed" fiasco is essentially a non-issue, it appears that Twitter has the service's security under control for the time being. Privacy and trust are big issues for companies like Twitter and had this been a real issue, surely many users would have felt betrayed.
The initial hype for Google Wave invitations was massive and ended up leaving those who were left out of the first 100,000 disappointed. The good news is that Google has started to send out a larger volume of invitations again after having slowly trickled them out since the launch.
Google Wave's Steph Hannnon tells us that they are sending out a bunch of invites.
(Credit: Twitter)Google Wave's Stephanie Hannon tweeted Sunday that Wave had overcome some of its stability issues over the weekend and that they were sending out a lot more invitations. As of Tuesday, "Google Wave" is the top trending topic on Twitter and the results are filled with users (including myself) bragging about receiving their invitations and not surprisingly, others begging for one.
The eBay economy for Google Wave invites has been pretty healthy, with some fetching upward of $80 to $100. This big influx of new invitees, all with 8 invitations each, will probably eliminate a lot of the demand for Wave invites on eBay, much like what happened with Gmail invites.
Google Wave invites are going for upwards of $80 on eBay.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)Google Wave will start to become a lot more valuable once more users get access to the site. It seems that Google is trying to roll out Wave to people as quickly as the service will allow, so the wait for those of you who haven't been lucky enough to snag an invite yet hopefully shouldn't be too bad. How many of you have been included in this recent wave (couldn't resist) of invites so far?
Google Docs' summer interns this summer were tasked with working on improvements and additions to the service geared toward students.
The results of their work, now available to try out, include new features such as an equation editor, superscripts and subscripts, document translation, improvements to surveys, and more outlining options.
Google Docs' new equation editor.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)While none of these features is groundbreaking on its own, collectively, they help round out Google's productivity suite, fulfilling some specific needs that probably prevented some from using the service.
A lot of people complain about the minimal feature set of Google Docs, as compared to market leader Microsoft Office, which got a 16-year head start on Google's offering and is sometimes criticized for being feature-cluttered. Students comprise one of the core groups of users and potential users of Docs, so it makes sense to build out the feature set to support the kinds of word-processing, spreadsheet-tweaking, and presentation-building tasks that they typically need to perform.
Web pages have long included anchor links, which, when clicked, send you to a specific section of the page. Wikipedia uses them heavily to help users jump between headings and navigate the sometimes large articles more efficiently. Google has announced that it is now including these anchor links in search results. This is right in line with Google's mission of helping users to find the information that they are looking for as quickly and accurately as possible.
Google calls out the headings (Overview, Requirements, Important reactions, See also) in this Wikipedia article on nuclear fusion.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)For an example of how this works, try searching for "nuclear fusion." As you can see, Google pulls out the headings in the article, so if I was really interested in the requirements for nuclear fusion, I could jump straight there. This is a great addition and really helps in cases where you are dealing with long, text-heavy pages.
If you are a Webmaster and want to set up your Web pages to identify sections to Google, then read this post on Google's Webmaster Central to get you started.
Vreebit is an immensely complex social-networking site, launched in beta on Thursday.
After seeing that it has taken Facebook five and a half years to become cash flow-positive, it seems that founders Michael Fleischmann and Chuck Donnelley are trying to create a new revenue model for their social network.
Vreebit includes a wealth of features, including a calendar, tasks, resume, docs and photos, links, discussions, polls, petitions, expert advice (think Yahoo Answers), and the ability to create your own 11-page Web site.
Upon signing up, users are given 100 "VreeBees," which are a virtual currency that can be used to buy actual goods on the site. You can earn more by participating in surveys, referring users, clicking on ads, and providing expert advice.
The VreeMarket offers a ton of things for users to buy with their VreeBees, ranging from books to video games to clothing. Not only can Vreebit post items for sale there, but actual users can post items as well, setting their price in VreeBees. This section of the site could also benefit from partnerships with some outside retailers.
VreeBees can also be used in exchange for services on the site, such as placing an advertisement, getting expert advice, and creating a survey. All of this activity creates an interesting economy on the site designed to motivate users to participate more.
The elements of this site that participate in the VreeBee economy seem to make sense, if the site can gain enough users. They are pretty unique and will drive more use of the service. However, other aspects of the site may greatly benefit from hook-ins with third-party services.
For example, instead of having to fill out your calendar on Vreebit (which doesn't sound overly appealing) the service could pull from Google Calendar for its content. And even though it is competing with Facebook, I think that Vreebit could benefit from using Facebook Connect, which can speed up account setup, automatically bringing in contact information and user data, as well as maintaining the same log-in.
Although Vreebit might be a bit crowded with not-so-enticing features, and users will likely be a bit wary of being rewarded specifically for clicking on ads (this will surely sink its ad rates through the floor), its virtual-currency model may have some potential.
With the addition of hook-ins for some third-party services, Vreebit may have a chance at becoming a viable social network, but for the moment, some users might be scared away by the amount of site features and the amount of time it takes to set up a new account--not to mention the fact that there's not much incentive to join a social network unless your friends are already there.
