Posts tagged says
Google+ a Party No One Came to, Says Ex-Google Engineer
Mar 14th
Google’s former director of engineering has slammed life at the company under the leadership of Larry Page, accusing the company of losing its focus on innovation and becoming an “advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus”.
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Twitter Executive Says Site’s Interface Needs An Overhaul
Mar 6th
If you’ve ever sent a tweet and thought “That seems so 1998″ you’re in good – and perhaps surprising – company.
Let’s face it: Twitter doesn’t let you hyperlink text, it doesn’t thread conversations and, despite a redesign late last year, it still doesn’t showcase video and photos as well as, say, that 845 million member social network that’s about to go public. And Mike Brown, director of corporate development at Twitter, thinks its time for the microblogging service to drop its “command line” style in favor of something more contemporary.
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“This isn’t the voice of Twitter speaking, this is my personal opinion,” Brown said in an address to the CITE Conference in San Francisco Tuesday. “We have an opportunity to up-level the chatter on Twitter to share a story in photo, in video and in narrative that helps people understand the story and if they want more detail they can dig into it and see what the conversation is behind the story,”
Brown, according to ComputerWorld, also hinted that Twitter plans to offer expanded analytics as a way to boost revenue. The expanded analytics will cover advertisers, “very important tweeters” and third-party application developers and will allow users to be better targeted with promoted tweets and ads.
“I’d say we’re in the second or third inning of the ball game,” Brown said. “We’ve got a long ways to go to get our analytics to where it needs to be.”
Twitter’s plans to offer an expanded suite of analytical tools was first reported by ReadWriteWeb in January. On Tuesday, Brown narrowed the timeframe for the release of those products to three to six months
“I think there are something like 350 million tweets a day … and that number is growing very quickly,” Brown said. “To keep up with that so that we can provide real-time analytics for those three constituencies is a major challenge.”
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Attorney Says Pinterest Needs To Change It Digital Copyright Policy
Feb 27th
Questions continue to mount about Pinterest’s uneasy relationship with copyright law, with one attorney (and avid Pinterest user) saying the company needs to upgrade its Digital Millenium Copyright Act policies or risk being shut down.
Connie Mableson, an attorney in Phoenix, offers a point-by-point breakdown of where Pinterest’s DMCA policy could get the increasingly popular social network into trouble. The problems range from simple clerical errors, like forgetting to update its registered designated agent as required by the act, to more serious problems, like failing to include “repeat infringer” language in the policy as required by federal digital copyright law.
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“A few simple changes will make this DMCA lawyer much more comfortable knowing her pins will not suddenly disappear one day when Pinterest is out of business due to paying other lawyers exorbitant amounts of money to defend it against claims of copyright infringement,” Mableson wrote.
We’ve asked Pinterest to respond to Mableson’s blog psot and will update when they get back to us.
Mableson’s post was published on the same weekend that Flickr confirmed that its site upgrade included code that prevents Pinterest users from pinning copyrighted images. The move is significant, as Flickr is the third most popular site for Pinterest content.
“Flickr has implemented the tag and it appears on all non-public/non-safe pages, as well as when a member has disabled sharing of their Flickr content,” a Flickr representative told VentureBeat Friday. “This means only content that is ‘safe,’ ‘public’ and has the sharing button enabled can be pinned to Pinterest.”
To date, Pinterest has been relatively quiet on its copyright policies, and copyright attorneys have been divided on what liability users have when they share content on the site. While the DMCA allows publishers to avoid liability for content posted by users, the flaws pointed out by Mableson could nullify those protections.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
S. Korea’s Bahk Says Oil May Push Inflation Above Forecast – BusinessWeek
Feb 27th
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S. Korea's Bahk Says Oil May Push Inflation Above Forecast
BusinessWeek By Gonzalo Vina and Eunkyung Seo Feb. 27 (Bloomberg) — South Korean inflation may accelerate above the government's forecast on higher oil prices, just as the nation's economic growth is about to start improving, Finance Minister Bahk Jae Wan said. |
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S. Korea’s Bahk Says Oil Surge May Mean Inflation Above Target – BusinessWeek
Feb 26th
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S. Korea's Bahk Says Oil Surge May Mean Inflation Above Target
BusinessWeek By Gonzalo Vina and Eunkyung Seo Feb. 27 (Bloomberg) — South Korean inflation may accelerate above the government's target on higher oil prices, just as the nation's economic growth is about to start improving, Finance Minister Bahk Jae Wan said. South Korea's Bahk Says Oil Price Surge May Mean Inflation Exceeds Target |
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What Facebook Says About Your Potential Job Performance
Feb 21st
Can a potential employer judge your potential work performance based on a Facebook profile? A new study forthcoming in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology says yes it can – in fact, even better than tests that human resource departments are used to running.
In this experiment, three “raters” were presented Facebook profiles of 56 college students who already had jobs. They spent about 10 minutes checking out the profiles, including the user’s wall posts, photos, comments, education and hobbies, and then answered personality-related questions about this person. They were most curious about these two questions: Is this person dependable? Is this person emotionally stable? In showing up for any job, those are two of the most important traits.
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Donald Kluemper, a management professor at Northern Illinois University, first released this study to the Chicago Tribune.
“Hiring specialists were just trying to eliminate someone who was doing something inappropriate,” Kluemper told the Tribune. “What we did is try to assess the personality traits in a similar way that they might be assessed by a standardized test.”
Who received the highest scores? Raters favored students who traveled, had more friends and showed interest in many hobbies. In other words, raters favored the well-rounded users. And those “partying” photos didn’t count against the user – rather, raters believed that users who socialized were more likely to be extroverted and friendly.
Job recruiters are already using Facebook as a tool. Whereas LinkedIn is a professional-focused space where everyone puts on their “best”, Facebook is a catch all, an odd mix of personal and professional. Many are already using their Facebook profile in more professional ways. Facebook Timeline users can receive custom-made MOO business cards. For those Facebook users who would like a bit more privacy, there’s an option to create lists and share information only with certain groups of Facebook friends.
But should we really be judged by how we present ourselves on social networks, particularly Facebook? Because there is no real context to our social networked personas, it can be difficult to glean real meaning from an obtuse status update, a sad love song or a meme that you felt compelled to share in the moment. The banal details of our lives are uninteresting and not worth reading into. What social networks do give us a peek into is the personality of a user, and how that fits into the potential job opening. After all, your Facebook personality is quite like the real you.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
“Scroogle.org Is Gone Forever” Says Site Owner
Feb 21st
A week ago, we reported that Scroogle was being blocked by Google and searches on the privacy search engine were no longer working. Since then, the site continued not to work and now it is completely offline. The owner, Daniel Brandt, said he took it down “forever.” He blames both…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
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Dilbert Cartoon Says SEOs Corrupt Industries – Search Engine Roundtable
Feb 20th
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Dilbert Cartoon Says SEOs Corrupt Industries
Search Engine Roundtable A Dilbert cartoon from Friday has been making its way through the SEO industry. The cartoon is pretty degrading of the SEO industry and the SEO profession. Just take a look at it and what it says: I hired a pantless weasel to do our search engine … Dilbert: Hiring A Weasel To Do SEO & Corrupt The Industry New Website Launched by SEO Magna SEO 1 Services Launches a Medical Marketing Division |
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Group Says Twitter Gave In To French Government’s Censorship Demands
Feb 20th
The digital rights group Internet Without Borders is accusing Twitter of shutting down four accounts that parodied the recently created Twitter account of French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
If true, it could mark the first time Twitter has succumbed to pressure from a government to censor user-created content. We’ve asked Twitter for comment and will update as soon as we hear back from them.
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Sarkozy opened his account last Wednesday, just hours before he was certified as a candidate for upcoming elections. Within 24 hours the parody accounts had been set up but, by Saturday, they had all been removed, according to Internet Without Borders.
Twitter’s guidelines allow people to set up parody accounts as long as they are not designed to intentionally deceive readers into thinking they belong to the person being parodied. The company will also verify popular accounts, which is has already done for Sarkozy’s account.
Twitter does not, however, actively monitor accounts, meaning it is up to users to complain when they feel an account violates Twitter’s guidelines. It is not clear who tipped the company off to the Sarkozy parody accounts.
Because the accounts have been removed, it’s also not clear what the offending material was.
“The creation of an official account of Nicolas Sarkozy on this space should in no way mean killing all of twitter accounts that criticize, or parody the campaign or the person of President of the Republic,” Internet Without Borders said.
The online publication kaboul.fr, which managed the suspended @_nicolassarkozy account, said it believes the complaints were filed by supporters or possibly campaign workers for Sarkozy. The company published a letter it sent to Twitter, noting that the account was clearly a parody and should not have been removed.
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Google Says 62% of Restaurant Searches Were Mobile on Valentine’s Day
Feb 16th
It pays to be mobile, if you want to reach the last-minute planners. According to Google 62% of restaurant related searches on Valentine’s Day were from “high end mobile devices or tablets.”
Something to think about for restaurants or other businesses that don’t have mobile-friendly sites.
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The volume of searches for restaurants was up drastically between 7th of February and Valentine’s day, from all devices. Google says that desktop searches spiked by 142%, tablet searches by 135%, and by 359% on mobile devices. Google’s results look at “popular chain restaurants,” so it’s unclear how that relates to local favorites. For example, Google probably isn’t catching searches for information on Mango’s Peruvian Cuisine or Prime 1000 here in St. Louis.
Google, of course, is hoping to convince restaurateurs that they should be doing mobile advertising. “If you weren’t advertising on mobile, you missed an opportunity to reach nearly two-thirds of consumers looking to find a restaurant.”
But it’s also a cue to restaurateurs that they should have sites that are mobile friendly. Hint: Flash-heavy sites and Flash-only sites need to die. Ideally, any restaurant worth its salt (sorry) should have a mobile site with the following:
- Menu
- Hours
- Phone number
- Address / directions
- Mobile-friendly reservation system
Restaurants without those things may still do decent business, but I suspect that the restaurants without mobile-friendly sites missed out on at least some customers.
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Restaurants weren’t the only things that mobile users were searching for. Google also outlined the difference in mobile searches for “flower-related terms” in California. Searches grew by 227% from February 7th through 14th. Google says that users were 560% more likely to click to call or get directions from an ad on Valentine’s day.
The results here shouldn’t be much of a surprise to anybody. At least, I find that they mirror my own experience in terms of using my phone to find restaurants and for shopping, though not so much the last-minuteness for Valentine’s Day. If you want to take advantage of last-minute planners (and remember, Valentine’s Day comes but once a year – but there are anniversaries and birthdays every day…), get your mobile game on.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
