Posts tagged Turns
Graph Search Turns White, Looks More Like A Traditional Search Box
May 21st
This morning many hardcore Facebook users will be surprised when they login and look towards the iconic top blue bar. The coloring of Graph Search has been inverted and now features a bright white centered search box in the midst of the top bar. Searches still act the same and provide the same…
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Why Your On-Page Turns Search Engines Away
Apr 8th
Today’s I’m going to show you how to ensure your on-page optimization doesn’t turn engines away. Let me first tell you a story. A friend of mine keeps his toothbrush in his kitchen. Thinking it peculiar, I inquired about it. He responded, “Do you keep your plates in your bathroom?” I thought this more quizzical than the [...]
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Twitter Turns 7: Now With 200 Million Active Users
Mar 21st
Twitter turned 7 years old today. The social network now has 200 million active users – up from 140 million active users last year. More than 400 million of the 140-characters tweets are sent every day – up from 340 million last year.
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Android’s Google Play Store Turns 1
Mar 6th
Google Play is celebrating its first birthday today by giving away free and cheap Android applications. Well, it’s not really Google Play’s first birthday, but it is exactly a year since Google rebranded its Android applications store.
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Plumbing Company in Columbus, OH, Turns to SEO Marketing Experts to … – PR.com (press release)
Mar 2nd
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Plumbing Company in Columbus, OH, Turns to SEO Marketing Experts to …
PR.com (press release) Columbus, OH, March 02, 2013 –(PR.com)– For Columbus-area home- and business owners in need of a plumbing company to conduct leak detection, drain cleaning, sewer repair, and other plumbing services, help is on the way. Locally owned business … |
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Bug Turns Google “Anti-SafeSearch” On, Provides Porn Results
Feb 9th
There’s a strange bug on Google where search queries that should bring up no matches are instead turning Google into a porn search engine, almost as if an “anti-SafeSearch” feature is being enabled. The Verge highlighted a Quora post about the bug, where doing some searches for…
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Infographic: When Link Building Turns Into A Linkpocalypse
Feb 4th
If you want to succeed with gaining search traffic through SEO, building links is one of the most important ranking factors that can help you. But go too far, and the search police might crack down on you. How do you avoid a disaster? To help, the folks at DNA created…
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Happy Birthday! The Transistor Turns 65 This Week
Dec 12th
On December 16, 1947, Bell Labs researchers William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain created an amplifier from a germanium crystal that boosted an input signal by 100 times. Various researchers had tried to develop a solid-state alternative to electromechanical switches and delicate vacuum tubes during the war. The Bell Labs Trio demonstrated it for lab officials a week later on December 23: Shockley deemed it ”a magnificent Christmas present.”
And only six months after the Roswell Incident. For the sake of argument, we’ll follow the official story.
Bell Labs announced it six months later. The trade press was ecstatic: Electronics put the three men, who would share the Nobel Prize for physics in 1956, on the cover. (Bardeen became a laureate a second time in 1972 for his work on superconductivity.) The New York Times only gave it a few paragraphs on page 46.
The transistor went on to become one of the signature scientific achievements of the 20th century, ranking up with splitting the atom, manned flight, and the discovery of DNA. One could argue, in fact, that the transistor was the most important breakthrough of the 20th century because subsequent advances in those other fields relied on the computing power made possible through integrated circuits and semiconductors. Information has become a science itself.
Computing, otherwise, would have been a cottage industry. ENIAC, the machine that brought computing to the public consciousness, only debuted 22 months before the transistor breakthrough. It relied on vacuum tubes. If Google built a datacenter based around the same technology behind ENIAC, a single datacenter would need as much power as Manhattan.
Sales and production skyrocketed. In 2003, Gordon Moore estimated that there were about 1018 transistors in the world, or about or about 100 times the number of ants in the word. Last year, the global semiconductor market came to $304 billion and an individual semiconductor device like an Intel Xeon can contain 2.5 billion transistors.
Unintended Consequences
The invention had a number of unanticipated consequences too. California, for instance, became the center of the world. The center of the computing industry, by rights, should be King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. The transistor came out of Bell Labs in New Jersey, after all. (So did the silicon solar cell). ENIAC came out of the University of Pennsylvania and early computer powers like Sperry Rand were located nearby. TV manufacturers like Philco clustered there too.
So how come parts of Philadelphia look more like a backdrop for a Frontline documentary on failed urban renewal than downtown Seoul on a Saturday night? Blame Fred Terman. The Stanford Provost wooed Shockley to come to Santa Clara County and others followed in his wake.
Business also became dominated by youth. Besides being a brilliant scientist, Shockley also happened to be a raging egomaniac. Several of the young engineers he hired at Shockley—Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, Eugene Kleiner—left to form Fairchild. At the time, it was a radical departure: the traitorous eight were essentially they wouldn’t work for a micromanager. Investors trusted them. Authority by seniority was doomed forever.
You can also see the development of the symbiotic relationship between marketing and computing. An internal Bell Labs committee concluded that “Semiconductor Triode” was probably the best option as a name for the invention, although they thought it could be a bit too long. “Solid Triode” had the advantage of brevity but the committee felt that it connoted “sturdy, massive, rugged or strong.” Small and minute were conveyed by “Iotatron” but some felt it could get confused with a vacuum component. John Pierce came up with the name “transistor” by combining “transconductance” and “varistor.”
A Lasting Impact
But ultimately, the biggest impact has been an unusual combination of rapid innovation and predictability. In electronics, things get cheaper, faster, and smaller simultaneously. You can’t say the same thing about designer cupcakes or industrial chemicals: bleach doesn’t get twice as caustic every two years. If the auto industry followed Moore’s Law for even a decade or two, a Rolls Royce would cost less than a dollar and be far faster than the models on the road. But it would also be less than a centimeter long.
The dynamic is due to the fact that small chips perform better. A transistor is really just a freeway for electrons. Decreasing its size shortens the commute and hence boosts the speed. Smaller transistors also are cheaper to manufacturer because more can be manufactured in a single wafer of finite size simultaneously. If you can double the number of processors that can be harvested from a wafer, it’s like doubling your factory capacity without paying a dime.
The End Of Moore’s Law
Will Moore’s Law come to an end? As it is used now, yes. Transistor shrinkage will hit physical limits: you can split atoms in ordinary manufacturing. Intel scientists have predicted transistor shrinkage might top out around 2020. Scientists from Hitachi at the Flash Memory Summit earlier this year noted that there might be only seven or eight turns of the crank left to reduce the size of transistors.
But that won’t be the end of creativity. Three dimensional transistors, which stack circuits vertically, are on the way from Toshiba, Intel, Samsung, Hitachi and others. This will let manufacturers get more powerful chips out of the same wafers. Thinner and wider wafers will further cut costs. Copper wires, which give off tremendous amounts of heat, will get replaced over time by fiber optic links.
Sixty five years from now, you’ll be reading the same article.
Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
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Search Engine Land Turns Six, Celebrates With New Editor-In-Chief & Expansion Plans
Dec 11th
It’s our sixth birthday here at Search Engine Land, and we’ve got some news — a new editor-in-chief and expansion plans for the future. Congratulations to Matt McGee, on his new position as Editor-In-Chief of Search Engine Land & Marketing Land! He starts on January 1, 2013….
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Instagram Turns Evil, And It’s All Our Fault
Dec 10th
Instagram and Twitter have had a falling out, as ReadWrite’s Jon Mitchell reported recently. In case you missed the latest Silicon Valley kerfuffle, the gist is that Instagram won’t let you view your photos on Twitter anymore and instead now forces you to leave Twitter and go look at them on Instagram. Instagram says Twitter started it. Twitter says Instagram started it.
Michael Arrington blasts them both, saying they’re putting themselves ahead of their members. True enough, but Arrington misses the larger point.
The real problem is not that the people running these companies are greedy, selfish and childish (though they are). The real problem is that they are behaving in a completely rational way given the Web 2.0 business model, which ultimately makes this kind of exploitation inevitable.
Companies like Twitter and Instagram (and Facebook, which owns Instagram) are set up in such a way that their interests have never been aligned with the interest of their users, but in fact are in complete opposition to them.
Blame The Business Model
The only way these companies can succeed financially is by tricking members and forcing them into walled gardens. Think of it this way – there’s a reason that they don’t hold a circus out in the open, and instead put it under a tent – and it’s not to keep you dry in case of rain.
Sure, some companies start out pretending to be all open and inclusive. That’s only because they need to ride on the backs of other services in order to attain sufficient scale. Once they’re big enough, they begin cutting off those connections, rounding up users, claiming ownership of your data and so on.
Twitter grew huge thanks to the work of lots of small partners who built Twitter add-ons. But once Twitter needed to make money, the partners got it in the neck. You might call this evil, but it is what Twitter needed to do.
Of course this stinks for users. But it’s naive to expect these companies to do anything else.
Arrington lashes into Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom, but if you’re Systrom, you’ve got to satisfy different stakeholders with divergent interests. You have investors, who want the biggest possible return in the shortest possible time. And you have users, who want as many features and as much interoperability as possible, at zero cost.
Which group do you think gets priority – the one that gave you millions of dollars to build your business, or the one that wants everything but doesn’t want to pay?
Arrington says screwing users is short-sighted, and that a smart company would “treat users with respect and make sure that your product does everything it can to delight and amaze.” A company that did this would build “a hundred year brand,” he says.
I’m sure he means this, so apparently there is at least one investor in Silicon Valley who believes that outfits like Instagram might be around in 100 years because our cyborg descendants will be as fascinated by old-fashioned photo filters as we are.
All the other venture capitalists, however, seem to operate under the (far more realistic) belief that this could all be over at any minute and you should grab as much as you can get while you still can. These are not long-distance thinkers. Heck, Facebook took heat for making its investors wait eight whole years to cash out in an IPO.
Wishful, Magical Thinking
As for this pipe dream about a magical utopian Web where serivces all interoperate and everything is wonderfully mashed-up and interoperable, well, that was a nice idea that some people had in the early days of Web 2.0.
But anyone who thought about it could see that this was never going to happen, especially if we also insisted on getting everything free. You can have one or the other, but you can’t have both.
The dream was rubbish, a big lie that was sold to us along with the one about “changing the world,” and the one about “a world that is more open and connected is a better world.”
That last one comes from Mark Zuckerberg. Yes, the same Mark Zuckerberg whose company doesn’t let users control their own data, and whose company owns Instagram, which just cut off connections to Twitter. The one that from the beginning has been a roach motel, a place where data goes in and doesn’t come out.
Then again, Facebook is the only Web 2.0 company that has ever managed to make serious money with a free service. So of course Facebook’s walled garden is the one all these other companies aspire to emulate. Who can blame them, since at this point it’s the only business plan that seems to work.
Then Again, We Could Just Pay
One solution – of course – would be for us to pay for these services, so that companies providing them didn’t need to screw us to stay alive.
As Jon Mitchell has pointed out, App.net is trying something like that.
But let’s be honest. We’ve all been trained to expect stuff free. And most of these services are not compelling enough that many people would pay for them. Sure, they’re fun, but if Facebook suddenly demanded $10 a month, how many of its billion users would still be around six months later? And that’s an app that most of us feel we can’t live without. The others would be gone in six minutes.
I know it’s fun to get angry at tech companies when they screw us over. But whose fault is it, really, when we end up getting tricked and exploited and treated like crap by companies we thought were our friends? Look in the mirror.
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