Posts tagged long
Cartoon: To Make a Long Story Short…
Jan 28th
I’m somebody who can, uh, go on. At length. About nearly any subject. Ask anyone who’s taken one of my classes… or read one of my blog posts once I get on a roll.
So I can understand why I’ll get the odd “TL;DR” in response. And I try not to take it personally; instead, I look on it as a reminder to pare my text down, murder my darlings and generally indulge myself a little less.
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That’s on a good day.
On a bad day, I mourn the rapid decline of human civilization, curse people’s can’t-be-bothered-to-read-anything-longer-than-a-tweet mentality, and generally grumble about “kids these days”. I imagine scenarios where the instructions for disarming a doomsday weapon are three paragraphs long, and nobody on the planet has the attention span required to get through them.
And I’m finding my bad days now outnumber my good days by about five to one, and rising.
In fact, there are times when I…
No! Wait! Don’t go – the post is almost over! You’ve nearly made it to the cartoon! All that’s left is the “you-can-find-more-Noise-to-Signal-cartoons-at-Rob’s-web-site” and you’re there!
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Search Rankings are Dead: Long Live Search Placements
Jan 19th
It’s a new year. Somebody needs to declare something dead. Recently, I gave a presentation on Google’s Search+ in which I said ranking reports no longer matter because there is no such thing as consistent Google rankings. What you see in the Google search results and what I see, for the exact same…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
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How Long Can Digg Rely Mainly on Facebook?
Jan 18th
When Facebook launched frictionless sharing last year, users flipped out. These days, it seems like they’re starting to come around. At least, that’s what Digg would like us to believe.
Digg launched its very own social reader on Facebook in late December 2011. Now, 2 million impressions later, it’s adding new features that it believes Facebook-Diggers (or maybe it should be Digg-Facebookers?) will enjoy. This announcement comes on the same day as the Facebook open graph rollout, and ties into Facebook’s vision of a frictionless sharing future.
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Users can add additional information to their Facebook Timeline and the news ticker, including specific stories they digg, comments they make and stories they’ve submitted. The social reader is more active than The Guardian or Washington Post, which just shows what the user read. This makes sense considering the active, community-focused nature of the original Digg site.
As with other frictionless sharing apps, the social reader doesn’t force everyone to share everything. Users publish on a per story basis, and can also choose what they share – submissions but not comments, diggs but not submissions, for example. The social reader gives users more control, with an ability to turn the social reader off from the Digg newsbar, or edit story activity to Timeline and the Activity Log after the fact.
But do any of these things matter? Digg is trying to regain the control it lost after Kevin Rose’s departure nearly one year ago. In October 2011, it added social newsrooms, re-inventing it as a real-time, game-driven news room. Gone are the days of simple up-voting and down-voting. The once most-popular online news site is still struggling to catch up. Will it?
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Long Live Firefox: Google Renews its Search Deal
Dec 21st
Ending a month of speculation, Google has renewed its search exclusivity deal with Mozilla, who has long featured Google as the default browser on its Firefox Web browser.
When the deal expired in November, it gave rise to speculation that Google might not renew it, which would deprive Firefox of about 84% of its annual revenue. That possibility seemed bolstered by the fact that Google’s Chrome was said to have recently ousted Firefox as the number two browser on the market. An end to the deal could have put the future of Firefox in jeopardy, although some thought the ominous predictions were overblown.
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For the next three years, Google will remain the default search engine in Firefox and Mozilla will continue to get a ton of cash from Google in return.
When the original deal was signed in 2008, Google was only getting started with Chrome, which then grew to be a significant player in the browser market.
Still, Firefox is used by millions of people and Google still wants a piece of that action. If the Google deal were to expire, it’s conceivable that Microsoft could swoop in and replace it with Bing, handing a significant chunk of the browser market share over to one of Google’s chief competitors.
Whatever Google would gain by pulling the financial rug out from beneath Firefox would be overshadowed by it losing even a few points in the search market, which is where most of Google’s revenue comes from.
Google has marketed Chrome as a speedier, more secure browser and capitalized on the familiarity people already have with the Google brand and its products. In the beginning of the month, at least one firm who’s counting said Chrome had eclipsed Firefox as the #2 browser behind Internet Explorer for the first time ever. These numbers vary from source to source, but there’s no denying that Chrome is growing fast. Even so, the company behind it evidently sees no reason to try and bury Firefox even further at this stage of the game.
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At Long Last, Flipboard Launches an iPhone App
Dec 6th
For iPad owners, the personalized, socially-curated digital magazine Flipboard is one of the absolute must-install apps for the device. For many, social news-reading apps like this have begun to replace printed magazines and newspapers all together. Pretty much since it first debuted on Apple’s tablet in July 2010, users have been clamoring for an iPhone version of Flipboard. Today, that wait ends.
Flipboard’s latest update, available now in the App Store, brings the same social media-fueled reading experience to the smaller screen of the iPhone and iPod Touch.
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More Than a Resize: Flipboard Gets Rebuilt For a Mobile Context
The team at Flipboard has done a remarkable job of whittling down what previously occupied a 10-inch screen so that it will properly fit on a smartphone. Not only did they size things down without losing any features, but they redesigned the experience to be more useful in a mobile context, Flipboard cofounder Evan Doll told us.
Rather than flipping horizontally as the app’s virtual pages do on the iPad, the iPhone version flips vertically. It also includes a new feature called Cover Stories, which offers a way for readers to quickly consume a handful of stories that are likely to be most relevant to them. The app selects these stories based on one’s reading preferences and social connections.
Other than that, the functionality of Flipboard for iPhone is pretty consistent with what users have come to expect on the iPad, just in a more compact package. There are a number of pre-curated content sections that can be added or users can plug in just about any publication with an RSS feed. Like its tablet-based predecessor, the new app hooks right into Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Google Reader and other social media services to provide a truly personalized reading experience.
By expanding to the iPhone and iPod Touch, Flipboard stands to expand its user base, potentially by a significant amount. As popular as the iPad is, they haven’t sold nearly as much as the iPhone, which has been on the market since 2007. As of early 2011, Apple was said to have sold over 100 million iPhones, a number that is sure to be much higher since the launch of the sales record-breaking iPhone 4S in October.
Flipboard had about 2.5 million users as of this summer, according to the Wall Street Journal. However much that number has grown since then, it’s likely to start skyrocketing before the end of the year.
When’s it Coming to Android?
Behind “Where’s the iPhone app?” the second most frequently asked question about Flipboard has to be “When is it coming to Android?” Doll declined to give us a specific timeline, but assured us that it’s a high priority for the growing startup.
Now that Flipboard has been adapted for smaller screens, we can’t imagine an Android version can be that far away. In terms of design, they’ve already got it nailed. They just need to have developers build it out for the Android platform, iron out a technical detail or two and work the launch around whatever other product development they’ve got going on.
Since its launch, Flipboard has given rise to quite a few competing apps, most of which are built for the iPad. Google is rumored to be building its own answer to Flipboard in the form of a project code-named Propeller, an Android app that was expected to go live in November.
The new Flipboard for iPhone is available for the iPhone 3GS, 4 and 4S, as well as newer iPod Touches. It will work on devices running iOS 4 and iOS 5.
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10 Google Search Changes Include Long Tail Indexing, Parked Domain Classifier
Dec 5th
Google has announced 10 search changes – a mix of algorithmic, crawling, and user interface updates. Better long-tail indexing and parked domain detection are among the announced changes. Additionally, Google has committed to writi…
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Google Checkout Is Dead, Long Live Google Wallet
Nov 17th
Yesterday Google Checkout users were notified that it was being merged into and replaced by Google Wallet. This makes sense on every level. From a ‘brand” and visibility standpoint Wallet is a more successful product already. Checkout was introduced in June, 2006 (it was rumored to be…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
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Apple: Music Cloud Lockers Are Fine, As Long as It’s Our Cloud
Nov 1st
Apple device owners who want to store their music collections in the cloud and listen to them on their iOS-powered devices had better keep waiting for iTunes Match. Using competing services like Google Music and Amazon Cloud Drive, it would appear, is off-limits for iPhone and iPad owners. There’s a setting within iOS 5 to activate iTunes Match, but the feature won’t work until the next version of iTunes is released.
Apple recently pulled a third party app that let users stream music from their Amazon cloud locker, reportedly due to legal concerns.
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Interactive Innovation Solutions, the company that built the app, also has an iOS app called gMusic that does the same thing for Google Music. Google’s beta music service is officially only available on desktops and Android-powered devices, but this workaround effectively brings it to iPhones, iPhones and iPod Touch devices. So far, the gMusic app has remained in the iTunes Store, although its developer tells Evolver.fm that a recent app update he submitted has been stalled by Apple.
Where’s iTunes Match?
iTunes Match, Apple’s somewhat different answer to Google and Amazon’s cloud lockers, was unveiled by Steve Jobs alongside iOS 5 in June, but the service has yet to be activated. When iOS 5 was launched last month, Apple said we should expect to see iTunes Match by the end of October, a deadline that has obviously passed now that November is here.
For iOS users who have grown impatient, it looks like trying one of Apple’s competitors isn’t an option for now. This is one of the limitations of this still-emerging space. Services like Google Music and iTunes Match ostensibly allow people to free their music from the confines of local storage and listen to them from any Internet-connected device. Yet, as this incident illustrates, such freedom comes with its limitations.
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