But Facebook, which celebrates its seventh birthday Friday and has more than a half-billion users worldwide, is not eagerly embracing its role as the insurrectionists’ instrument of choice. Its strategy contrasts with rivals Google and Twitter, which actively helped opposition leaders communicate after the Egyptian government shut down Internet access.
App shortcuts open in a dedicated window devoid of browser buttons and are handy for frequently accessed sites, like Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and, well, you get the idea. To create one, navigate to Wrench > Tools > Create application shortcuts… and punch the Create button.
It’s their search and they’ve made their choice. The funny part is that something as relatively harmless as downloading torrents is considered taboo on Google, but there are plenty of other more harmful searches that Google is all too willing to recommend…
So what we’re left with is, as Wadhwa points out, the need for a new and better Google. It may or not be Blekko, but it will likely be something like Blekko that enables searching of selected areas of the web — not every single SEO-enhanced spam site. I, for one, will welcome my new search overlord.
One of the things that absolutely infuriates me about Google is the arrogance and disdain that it shows to its users. The ‘Did you mean’ option is a case in point. It used to be quite useful, especially if you had messed up the spelling, as you could then say ‘oh yes, silly me, thanks’ - click the correction and on you went. However, since they enhanced it about this time last year, they’ve seriously gone overboard. I pretty much know what I want thanks, and ignore the ‘did you mean option’. But oh no… I can’t do that now, as Google has decided that it knows best and takes control of MY search.
Facebook is now the third largest website in the world, taking the No. 3 spot from Yahoo, according to comScore. Facebook drew an estimated 648 million unique visitors from across the globe in November, 2010, compared to 630 million for Yahoo. In October the two sites were dead even with 633 million worldwide unique visitors each (actually Facebook had already passed Yahoo by a smidgeon in October with about half a million more visitors). The only two Web properties left which are bigger than Facebook are Microsoft (869 million worldwide visitors) and Google (970 million) when you look at all of their sites collectively.
Google Labs has quietly debuted Shared Spaces, using Google Wave technology to let users quickly create a space with collaborative gadgets and a chat box inside. As soon as it’s open to the general public, it will be simple and quick to create a space, grab a gadget from the gallery of 50 that already exist, and then paste the Space’s URL into a chat window, e-mail message, tweet or any other content-sharing platform. If users know JavaScript, they can create their own gadgets and then rapidly build a Space around it, inviting all to participate.
First and foremost, you have to be the most jaded or cynical scholar not to be excited by the release of the Google Books Ngram Viewer and (perhaps even more exciting for the geeks among us) the associated datasets. In the same way that the main Google Books site has introduced many scholars to the potential of digital collections on the web, Google Ngrams will introduce many scholars to the possibilities of digital research.
