Google+ Games

Just spent a bit of time playing around with Google+ games, and I have to say, I'm really enjoying them! I don't ever see any game status updates, I don't get notifications about games, I don't get spammed about games, UNLESS I'm in the "Games" tab. I love gaming, I really do, but I don't use the Google+ Social Network to play games, I use social networks to socialize, the games are a nice bonus, but I don't want them to be the main feature. The Games Tab makes this simple and elegant. One of the main reasons I'm loving Google+ right now. And beyond that, the games are actually pretty good! More to come later!

Chrome OS Bootable Flash Drive! (Built on: 3/28/2011)

 

Well, here it is again! Another build, this one a week later. I've heard some reports that the Chrome Web Apps weren't working quite perfectly on some machines, that's the risk when you're running daily-builds of an operating system. This is freshly built as of yesterday, and I've update the instructions to include how to create a bootable Chrome OS flash drive in both Linux and Mac OSX. As usual, the Windows instructions are still there as always. After the jump, I'll include a copy/paste of the Instructions.txt file for your convenience. Have fun and let me know what you think!

Chrome OS - 032811.7z

New Version Here

Credits and Utilities:
To unpack this file, you will need the totally awesome and free unzipping utility: 7zip
This pack contains the Image Writer for Microsoft Windows, which is a great, simple way to take or place images onto drives. Give these guys a hand!

Chrome OS Bootable Flash Drive! (Built on: 3/24/2011)

I've taken to packaging my own vanilla builds of Chrome OS (Well... Chromium OS), and am going to start releasing them semi-regularly. Comes packed with the great Image Writer for Microsoft Windows (https://launchpad.net/win32-image-writer) and stupid-simple instructions on getting a bootable flash drive made to test drive Chrome OS. Ever since Hexxeh stopped major development (that I've seen, correct me if I'm wrong), I've been listening to people clamor for an easy way to test drive Chrome OS without having to build from the source code up. I want to help those people. Every so often, I will make a build of Chrome OS and post it here to my blog. Enjoy!!

This file is packed with 7-zip! The completely free (and open source) zipping utility! Grab it here: http://www.7-zip.org/
Chrome OS - 032111.7z - ~120MB
New Version Here

Bing: Powered by Google - Stolen Search Results

Breaking tech news today! It has been uncovered that Bing has been poaching Google search results! Here are the cliff notes:

• Bing will show the spellchecked search results from Google, without fixing the misspelling.
• Bing results have been suspiciously close to Google results for a long time, Google decided to create a sting operation.
• Google created non-sense words and results pages for those made-up jumbles of characters.
• Google tasked engineers to search for these words from home, using Internet Explorer with Suggested Sites enabled and the Bing toolbar installed.
• Soon after, these non-sense search results (Which had NOTHING to do with the term searched for) started popping up on Bing.
• 7 out of 9 tests give overwhelming evidence that Bing has been stealing search results from Google.

So what exactly does this mean for Bing? Microsoft is holding a search event later today (which is why Google could be unveiling this now), and Matt Cutts is on a panel with them later today, so I expect we will hear more then.

The original tweet is here: http://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/32459370511994880

Check out the very thorough and awesome analysis of the situation by Search Engine Land.

I think search is going to get very interesting over the next couple of weeks...

Aardvark

I've stumbled upon a cool, new web service called Aardvark. Essentially, its ChaCha, but with a much higher limit on the amount of questions you can ask (7 at the moment), and on top of that, the limit resets daily. I've been using the service for a while now and have not been disappointed. Lets take a look at how the service works:
You submit a question to Aardvark via web, IM, or iPhone app (SMS and Android app in development!). Aardvark then sends the question to other users who want to answer questions on that topic. For instance, my topics include: Linux, Technology, Android, The Internet, and Operating Systems, among many others, so I receive questions on those topics (If you want, you can also take on any open question that has not received an answer yet). Aardvark then passes your question around to various individuals and has them give their best answers. Questions usually receive 2-3 answers, and times range around 5 minutes to a few hours for all answers to roll in. The time taken to get an answer back is relatively short, and the answers themselves tend to be more personalized and helpful than ChaCha's, which I have found to be unreliable at times. Question-askers are then asked to say "Thanks!" click one of three choices to rate the answer they received. "Was So-And-So's Answer Helpful?", you can choose: Yes, No, or Kind of but not for me. This helps Aardvark weed out the less-than-helpful users and give more questions to the higher-rated ones.
Aardvark is a pretty cool service, and with enough people and time, it could be as well known as Yahoo Answers or ChaCha, there are only a few things holding it back:

• The lack of an SMS option:
• The lack of an Android App
• Any major (revealing) news from the site regarding them being picked up by Google.

But the service has more going for it than against it, including: Social integration with Twitter and Facebook, a very well done (and innovative) community voting page, and a service that not only works, but provides great service to all of its users. Whenever I'm logged into my IM client, I absolutely love seeing Aardvark pop up with a tech question for me to answer. If I don't feel like it at the moment, I can tell it, "Busy" or "Pass" and it gets the idea. Aardvark doesn't bug me at all, its all very wonderfully tuned to be just the perfect amount of user interaction. Do yourself a favor and try it out today, I'm sure you'll quickly become a fan.


Aardvark

The Power of Human Search

After listening to This Week in Google: Episode 46, I started to think about human-powered search in a different light. Human-curated search engines have been around since the dawn of time, but none of them have ever gained any hugely significant market share when stacked up against the big players (Google, Yahoo, MSN/Bing). Have you ever heard of Mahalo? They are one of the biggest players in this space and they are on the cusp of the unknown in the search world. Gaining most of their popularity through their confident and highly skilled CEO Jason Calacanis, Mahalo is amazingly stable in a business topography that changes radically. With the recent debates over Facebook, Google gaining access to Twitter's data firehose, and now people looking at Facebook for real-time search results, I've been struck with a question that I just can't seem to shake off.

Why hasn't human-powered search ever taken off?


After thinking about this for a while, I've come to the conclusion that the biggest factor against human-powered search engines is that they are all missing one key thing: Humans. If you build a search engine that is entirely dependent on people, you need one key thing to make it work: People! This is what is so innately brilliant about social networks like Facebook and Twitter is that they've gained an enormous amount of active users. Plenty of people posting statuses, recommendations, and location data, all because they want to. Search is just a natural evolution for these services. With a product like Twitter, rolling out search is easy, the service is public-by-default, and people know this. They won't mind being rolled into a search index. Facebook is a more complicated venture. Only the people who want to share with the world should be rolled into the search index. But what about link stats, trends, and general user analytics? Should users be rolled into this non-descriptive, very general, non-identifying trend-graph? That is the question that is currently posing Facebook, and with the recent outcry over their privacy settings (and priorities), they are closely watching what they do with their user data (as they should).  This isn't to say, however, that completely public-by-choice users shouldn't be used to build a people-powered search engine. They should! As a matter of fact, it just might be 'cool' enough to power a search engine that it would force people to start opening holes in their Facebook privacy for just this reason. If there is one thing that is for certain: People want to feel needed, the want to feel like part of a larger movement or group, and a Facebook-Powered search engine would do just that.

Google has noticed that real-time search is the next big thing with their release of Caffeine. Because of this new technology, Google has stated that their speeds have increased by 50% on bringing fresh results to a search query. Google knows that real-time results matter for content (especially news content) and is working to bring the freshest parts of the web to you faster. If that isn't fast enough, Google is also pulling the very latest data from Twitter in real time! When you search for 'Oil Spill', you see "Latest results for Oil Spill" and a scrolling Twitter search starts running on your results page right under that. Google and Microsoft have both admitted that human-powered search results, while they may never replace algorithm-based results, play an important role in what people are looking for and how results are curated.

Human-powered results are incredibly important with breaking news items, restaurant reviews, personal recommendations, and things that aren't conductive to "Just Googling It". Things that are happening right now, or situation-dependent searches are much better answered with a human-component involved. Take the question, "What is a good present to buy a 13-year-old for his birthday?", the best answers are taken from Wiki-Answers, Yahoo Answers, and Yelp. All human-powered websites, built around curating and processing varying opinions, reviews, and suggestions. The big search players have figured this out: Human augmented search is here to stay. I believe that with the boom in user numbers from both Facebook and Twitter, there hasn't been a better time find users that could power an exclusively human-powered search engine, and only time will tell if the world is ready for one to thrive.

SEO: A Fake Science?

Disclaimer: 99% of this post was taken from a series of back-and-forth Facebook comments. The debate was extremely thought-provoking and raises some interesting questions from both sides of the fence. In the interest of the other individual, neither quotes, nor names will be posted regarding the discussion, rather, the general feel and main points of the conversation will be posted. There isn't a clear-cut victor at all, the point of this post is to get us thinking about the internet and how it is built, structured, searched, and consumed. To be honest, I thought about skipping this article entirely, as these are extremely controversial talking points among web-folk. Think about your own websites as you read on.

Recently I was involved in a Facebook debate about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and I align with Leo Laporte in his thinking about SEO. In case you don't know what this is, I'll explain it to you: Search Engine Optimization - These con-men promise you a number one spot on Google searches and the only thing they do is change page titles. There isn't any way to game Google, but these guys con people out of hundreds of dollars at a time with a snake-oil solution.

My position is that SEO is a fake science. Sure, there are a few things to make your site more search-friendly: Change your page titles to reflect your content, put important things near the top, register your domain for more than a year, and build a site map. Guess what? These are all things Google itself suggests when you look up page rank information or use Google's Webmaster Tools. There is no magical incantation to game Google. Not now, not ever. The only way to get top results is to create rich content on a consistent basis. How do you expect to game a constantly changing algorithm? The search algorithm goes through multiple changes every month at the very least. If it were that easy to game the results, you'd only find spam in search results. SEO is utter trash. The only way to rise in search results is to create rich content, bring users to your site, and create this rich content on a consistent basis. This is also known as, the elusive and rare, "Having a decent website you actually put work into." Crazy idea, I know...
From some research on Google Patents, the best way to jump ahead in Google search results is to grow your site organically, there aren't any magical keyword or link incantations or special header HTML one can call on to give your site that search boost to propel it to the top, it just won't happen.
The funny thing is, SEO's make tons of money every day by scamming people out of their hard-earned cash by promising them a number one spot in search results. At one point in time, there were plenty of people making huge amounts of money from astrology, fortune telling, and alchemy. SEO is the exact same 'science'. These internet 'magicians' promise clients huge traffic boosts out of arcane, secretive methods, that are far, far too complicated for the average person to learn. I'm sure we've all heard these stories before.
There are ways to help content become searchable, but a company buying out keywords from linkfarms does nothing to get the top spots from Google. Buying advertising is another thing entirely. Sure, spend thousands on AdWords, it WILL drive traffic, but those aren't search results, those are sponsored positions.
Just like those (at one point) 'sciences' of centuries past, plenty of people put in plenty of time and made plenty of money, bit in the end, was anything really accomplished? No.
Don't get caught up in this same trap.

Even with my beliefs, the fact remails: There are TONS of people out there that build entire careers out of becoming SEO ninjas. To them, its a real job, doing market research, finding keywords, categorizing and saving backlinks, and using all of these at the proper time to avoid being categorized as spam. They own tons of domains and use various page layout techniques and keyword frequencies to get their job done.

But does it actually work? My money says, 'No'. But it does raise some interesting questions about search engines, web design, spam, and risk management. As web designers and construction-workers of the internet, we should ask ourselves these questions:

• What works better? Raising a site organically, or building a site using a highly-organized series of backlinks?
• Does repeating keywords drive traffic?
• Will the new Google Caffeine make old, keyword-heavy content obsolete?
• Do you see keyword-heavy or link-heavy pages as spam?
• Can Google (or any other search entity) be gamed for a significant profit?
• Is it worth the risk? If a site is flagged as spam on Google, you can guarantee the website is losing out on much more than it could ever gain.

Go ahead and post your answers in the comments, and if you want, ask your own questions as well! Questions like this are important to the foundation of the internet and how we think about search and quality content. One thing is for certain: These aren't easy questions to answer, and I don't believe any one person is qualified to answer them, but its the thought that counts.

We're Watching You, Facebook.

As you all know, a while ago I deleted my Facebook account, and it was due in part to a few things. First off, the constantly changing and ever-confusing privacy settings. Second, my postings being censored on Facebook. Third, and frankly, the biggest reason: I didn't want to encourage my friends to use a system that would put their data and privacy at risk. Well... Reason number one (and therefore number three) have been fixed. The jury is still out on reason number two, but I feel that with my continued reliance on free and open services, and the fact that I will be using Facebook for links to the outside, free, open web, that the censorship will be minimal if at all.Facebook is in a very precarious position right now, the entire tech industry and all of the major media outlets are watching them and what they do. And they know it. Zuckerberg and the Facebook executive members have come out of the woodwork to explain that they've "Missed the mark." Amazingly enough, another company that shares some of what Facebook is currently going through is Toyota. With the Prius going through numerous product recalls, the most media-laden being a braking problem due to a software bug, Toyota is feeling the consumer-distrust-pinch just as much as Facebook is right now. Although.. this doesn't have to work in the disinterest of consumers/users.
A few people have told me something along the lines of, "If I'm going to buy a car anytime in the next year, it will be a Prius.", and while this may sound absolutely insane, it makes logical sense. Toyota is being watched. By everyone. Each and every consumer, safety agencies, government regulators, factory workers. Everyone that so much as glances at a Prius are doing their part to inspect, double and triple-check the design and safety of the vehicle because of the pressure. You, as a consumer, can be guaranteed, that the Prius is going to be the safest, most inspected, most tested car of this year. Toyota can't screw it up again, it would be a death-knell for the model as well as the global image of the entire company. Toyota is walking on eggshells for a good reason and the biggest winners are the consumers.
Same story with Facebook. They've fucked up; and this time, they've fucked up bad enough to anger their entire userbase, cause a media outcry, and drive users to create worldwide movement to quit the service entirely. If any online service is positioned to lose it all over one more misstep, its Facebook. One more privacy violation, information-leaking bug, or advertising leak, and people will jump ship, and for good this time. This month, Facebook got a wake-up call from its more prominent, and more vocal userbase, and if they want to stand any chance at all at winning these users back (and keeping them), they need to be very, very, very, careful about how they go about changing policies, or introducing new features.
This is why I've decided to come back to Facebook. They really messed up, they got the attention of the entire tech world, and even a good portion of the 'normal' world's media. They can't afford to make another mistake. If Facebook even so much as breathes the wrong way, everyone and their mother will be grabbing the torches and pitchforks to put down this monster once and for all. Facebook is incredibly convenient, but at what cost? For now, I feel a bit safer knowing that the entire tech industry will be holding this service accountable for how they treat their users. Again, they haven't fixed everything, at all. There is still a huge issue with exporting data from the service. Baby steps. They've done a good thing this week, I for one hope this isn't a one-time scenario, I really want Facebook to start being a more open platform. There are some things that I will not change about my decision to untie myself from the platform, however: I will continue to use Buzz, Twitter, PicasaWeb, and other open sites for my content over Facebook. My Facebook page will serve a dual purpose: Aggregation and social connectivity. When I publish content or post images, it won't be a Facebook post or uploaded to a Facebook photo album; Facebook will be getting a link to these other places on the web. While this might be slightly annoying for my Facebook followers, I can't take the chance of any of my content getting locked into Facebook permanently. I won't do it. Congratulations, Zuckerberg, you've won back this user, but remember, as soon as you fuck up again, I'm out and I'll take people with me. We're watching you, Facebook, and you can't afford to let us down again.
Either way, none of this will matter once Diaspora comes out in September, but that's another post for another day.

Why Defaults Matter - Another Look at the Facebook Debate

Not all of us are computer geeks... Actually... the vast majority of us are anything but. Yes, there are privacy settings, and in the case that you have a PhD in Facebooking, you can edit these settings and know exactly how they will function. In a perfect world, we could set, process, and understand each and every one of these privacy settings and know exactly how they will work, regardless of our friends' privacy settings, the applications they use, or the websites we visit that have included Facebook technology.
Facebook's privacy settings have been worsening ever since the company came into being in 2004, and it doesn't look like Facebook's stance will change anytime in the near future. I've deleted my account for a few reasons, but the biggest reason is the same as Leo Laporte's. If I continue to stay on Facebook, even as just a content publisher and aggregator, I'm pushing people to continue to use that service and put their privacy and data at risk. Just my presence on the service is like saying, "No, its ok if you're on Facebook, just use it in this way.", but we all know that won't fix anything. Just by participating, I'm giving more power to the Facebook machine. This is why I've decided to end my Facebook account and move to more open services. Jason Calacanis made many excellent points in his blog post/email and it appears that he will also follow suit. As always, you can follow me here or on Twitter to stay up with the latest.

When is Good?

Have you ever wanted an easy way to set up a time to meet somewhere, do a project, plan a big dinner, or just about anything else that involves a group of people with busy schedules? If your group is part of the digital age, plan your next dinner party/act of terrorism with When is Good. A very simple site, but it does the best job of getting you an answer with the least amount of hassle, you don't even have to register!

First: Choose some dates and times that work for you by clicking them.

Next: Write down your super secret code (remember, you don't have to register!).

Then you'll receive some links to throw around. Need to change the event? No problem! Just be warned though... any already submitted responses will be deleted. Send the invites off and wait for everyone to chime in!

When you get responses, When is Good will bring up a helpful little chart of who can and can't make it.

If your invitees leave comments, you'll be able to see those as well with a mouseover.

Click on a day, and a synopsis of who can and can't make it will pop up. Leaving you the amazing task of who you should leave behind.

And that concludes the screenshot tour of "When is Good" . A simple little web app that comes in handy just often enough to be of use.

http://www.whenisgood.net/

SnapPages: Website creation for the rest of us.

Have you ever wanted to build a webpage without bothering to need Dreamweaver, Frontpage (also known as 'complete shit'), or an open source solution, like Kompozer? I've got the answer for you: SnapPages! This isn't a site for you hard-core hand-tweaked code people, nor is it a solution for people that need an relatively large amount of space to play with. But for everyone else just looking for a website building utility that comes with more power than the others, you've found your fit.

SnapPages makes every page a drag and drop effort. Pick the piece you want from the sidebar, drag it over, then click it and edit its options. SnapPages has an amazing amount of content to choose from and modify. If you want, you can even use the built in banner-creation utility to create modified and animated banner logos for your website. 

But you don't only get to create simple pages, you can choose from themes, blogs, photo galleries, shared, public, or private calendars, or pages that only your friends can see.

Don't know exactly where to get started? Let the "Page Templates" fuel your curiosity. From profile pages to contact forms, this is pretty much as easy as it gets. 

Go ahead! Give it a try! The only thing you need to be concerned about is that some of the themes require a paid membership, but the free stuff works well enough for personal pages. A great option for those looking to create a webpage for personal use, but aren't willing to grab a dedicated server or hosting plan. Sweet, simple, sexy, SnapPages brings Web Design to the average user.

Fizy! Music for the Rest of Us

Yet another "Web 2.0" app to write about... This time, its Fizy! Have you ever just wanted to hear one song to get it out of your head, or look up an old classic, or just play one awesome song over and over again? Well now you can... for now that is..

Fizy is a super-simple, easy-to-use search engine / music player that probably has a couple weeks to live. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea, I love the style, I love the simplicity, I love the way the songs just come up and play. Its fast, easy, and makes P2P just about useless if you only have an itching to hear a song once or twice. The advertising possibilities are endless! But then again... that's what people said about Pandora. Now I love Pandora as much as the next music junkie, but its become a lot less useful ever since the RIAA had their way with it.

I really love the direction Fizy is going, but I can't help but wonder... how long can they keep this up?

http://fizy.com/

Pipl - The People Search Engine

    By now you all know that courts make their records public for those over the magical age of 18. If you've ever received a speeding ticket, you're in a publicly accessible internet database with the charge plastered all over some webpage. But how much information is truly out there about you? And more importantly, how easily accessible is it? If you've ever googled your name, you've either been totally creeped out, or more likely, reassured. Google does a lot of things very well, the one thing they suck at is people search. I can search all day on Google for Tom Webster, and I think I'm the 18th on the list. Not bad... but most everything else in the search results are not me. Granted.. those with a more common name will be harder to search out, but Google doesn't index court records, and if they do, they don't do it very well. Pipl (pronounced "people") is more than just a public records search engine, its (as the name implies) a search engine if you're looking for one thing and one thing only: A person. Pipl searches not only court records, but they also search public government databases, tons of social networking websites, photo websites (such as flickr), LexisNexis, Amazon.com public wish lists, and many other places to grab information about a particular person. Its an absolutely amazing tool if you're an employer, and a terrifying tool if you're a person who's running from what's available in the public record. Pipl is a wonderful technical achievement for making information more easily accessable, but its also a bit unnerving. I have a FriendFeed Profile which I laughably nickname "Stalker 2.0", but its never quite revealed this much information. Again.. the less common the search term, the better results you'll get. Try it out! I'm sure you'll be digging up terrible family secrets in no time!

http://www.pipl.com 

Daily Lit

Haven't posted in a while, but I've been reading about a ton of new tech. While I could go on about the amazing Public Beta of Windows 7 (which I've been using for about three weeks already), or Palm's return to form with the new Pre. I'm going to delve into a website I've been using for years that I think you should give a shot.

First off: We don't have time to read. We have jobs, classes, friends, family matters, and reruns of I Love Lucy to attend to on a daily basis. Reading just doesn't top our priority lists, and even if it does, we have to deliberately carve out sections of our day to make it fit. The solution is DailyLit. An amazingly simple idea that allows you to read a book slowly over time through email or RSS. DailyLit sends you small, easily digestible chunks of books to your inbox, your cell phone, or your favorite RSS program. They even include a link to grab the next chunk instantly if you get really involved in the story.

Most of the books on DailyLit are public domain or Creative Commons licensed (this means FREE), but there are a few premium books scattered here and there. You won't find the newest books or best sellers here, but if you feel like reading a classic, you're in luck. Next time you're at work, checking emails, browsing digg.com, and genuinely wasting your time, try something new, feel like you're making a slow but steady accomplishment by reading a book on DailyLit. Check it out, I'm sure you'll like it!

DailyLit.com

By the way: Right now I'm reading Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, and I'd suggest starting out with Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig. Its quite the amazing book that takes a detailed look at Copyright and how its essentially broken and useless in this day and age of technology. But that's another post for another day.