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Google Mobile Announces Search by Voice for Maps

cgseo — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 03:08:00 +0000

If you want to map a locale or score some directions but want to avoid driving into a pole, you can now use your pipes . Google Maps now recognizes Search by Voice on Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 phones. Google introduced Search by Voice in 2008 and has been rolling that functionality out into different parts of the Googlesphere since. Now Google Maps 4.1 comes with voice search. Sponsor The categories of search that Maps will now recognize vocally includes the full spectrum of search fields already enabled for mobile. business name business category city, state ZIP code postal address intersection, city, state airport code latitude longitude Hands-free it is not, however. To start the search you still need to open Google Maps and hit "call" prior to making your search. The install is available on qualifying phones at m.google.com/maps . An interesting aspect of the language settings the ability to select not just your language but, if it's English, the accent you use. I wonder if this functionality will be available to Spanish-speakers or whether the different accents within Yue Chinese will eventually be recognized. Discuss

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Google Mobile Announces Search by Voice for Maps

TwitterClaims: Be First In The Twitter Username Land Rush

cgseo — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 20:24:59 +0000

Last week after Twitter's Chirp conference, Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land asked Twitter Co-founder Evan Williams when we would begin to see the release of inactive and deleted Twitter usernames back into the wild. The answer turns out to be soon for some and later for others, but the question remains - how will we know when that name is finally available? Well, two developers, Blake Crosley and Luke Woodard , have jumped onto this goldrush and created TwitterClaims . Sponsor According to Sullivan, Twitter is still trying to figure out the proper way to handle the situation, as some usernames have been used but have recently sat inactive, while others were swept up in mass name claims by squatters and others still have simply been abandoned. (Sullivan notes an anecdote by Williams of one person who registered more than 10,000 names in one fell swoop but has done nothing with them.) So if you've been eyeballing that perfect Twitter username, just watching it sit there and do nothing, TwitterClaims claims to have the answer. Simply enter your email address and give the site up to ten names that you're looking forward to having and the service will email you when the name becomes available. The service checks once an hour to see if the name is available and once it is, it emails you to let you know. Simple. It looks like anyone can claim a name, so once it becomes available and the notifiction is set, it's on. You'll still have to get there first, and others can be getting the same notification about that same username. Discuss

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TwitterClaims: Be First In The Twitter Username Land Rush

Google Introduces Localized Google Suggest and Smarter Auto-Corrections

cgseo — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 17:26:20 +0000

About a year ago, Google launched real-time search suggestions that were tailored towards users in different countries. Today, Google is taking this one step further and is l aunching an improved version of Google Suggest that also takes larger metro areas into account. Now, Google Suggest will offer different suggestions for users in New York City and Portland, OR, for example. For the time being, this feature is only available in the U.S. Sponsor Smarter Spelling Correction for Names In addition, Google is also rolling out smarter corrected spellings for names. As Google notes, people often search for names, but don't know the exact spelling. Now, whenever you add a person's profession, affiliation or other related keywords to an approximation of this person's name, Google will offer better suggestions and more useful spelling corrections. This feature, too, is currently only available in the U.S., though Google plans to roll it out in other parts of the world within the next few months. Auto-Correction for 31 Additional Languages Google is also rolling out auto-corrected spellings for 31 additional languages. These auto-corrections kick in whenever a user misspells a common word. For uncommon misspellings, Google will still give you a link to the corrected search results behind a link that says " Did you mean: ReadWriteWeb ." Whenever Google feels confidents that the auto-corrected version is what you were really looking for, the search engine bypasses the link and just drops you off on a search results page that is based on the correct spelling. Discuss

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Google Introduces Localized Google Suggest and Smarter Auto-Corrections

Google’s Twitter Timeline Lets You Explore the Past

cgseo — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 16:25:20 +0000

As Google has worked to add more and more real-time search capabilities by adding content from sites like Facebook, MySpace, Buzz and Twitter, we've been able to see more and more what people are talking about online. Google's latest feature that it is announcing today takes real-time data and puts it into a perspective we can work with - the past. Sponsor Rather than letting all of this real-time data simply stream past and evaporate into thin air, Google is rolling out a "replay" feature, that lets you look at real-time data, in this case tweets, at any specific time in the past. The feature offers a timeline of tweets, showing the volume of tweets containing relevant search terms, broken down according to scale. After playing with it for a few minutes, we were able to see that it even gets as narrow as a minute by minute breakdown of tweets on a topic. It will be available by clicking on "Show Options" on the left side of your screen and then "Updates". For now, Google says that it will offer tweets going back to February 11, 2010 but will soon extend back to March 21, 2006. The company says that the feature is currently rolling out and should be available globally in English within the next few days, but you can give it a whirl before then. As Google points out, the "replay" feature may be a great way to explore " how the news broke about health care legislation in Congress, what people were saying about Justice Paul Stevens' retirement or what people were tweeting during your own marathon run? These are the kinds of things you can explore with the new updates mode." We're looking forward to seeing what this sort of interaction with real-time data, in the aggregate, will bring to the table. It might not only be an invaluable reporting tool, but a great way to find out when a local restaurant is at its busiest. Discuss

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Google's Twitter Timeline Lets You Explore the Past

Microblogging vs. Blogging: 5 Ways to Create an Open Twitter Alternative

cgseo — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 22:35:00 +0000

Given the recent developments in the Twitter developer ecosystem, I think it's a good time to revisit the idea of an open Web alternative to Twitter. The fact is, the differences between microblogging and normal blogging are insignificant. I'm going to detail five of the differences. My point in doing so is to illustrate that the best way to bootstrap an open alternative to Twitter is not by inventing a bunch of new technologies or products. Instead, I want to show that most of the pieces already exist in the current blogging ecosystem. With a few modifications, a distributed microblogging ecosystem can easily emerge. Sponsor Guest author Chris Saad is VP of strategy at Echo , the world's leading provider of comment/conversation technology to Tier 1 publishers. His role is to track trends in the marketplace, listen to and participate in the community and translate those needs into actionable product direction. His background includes co-authoring of the Attention Profiling Markup Language (APML) specification, and co-founding the DataPortability Project . Used by Digg, BBC, NewsGator, France Telecom and others, APML is industry standard for Attention Profiles. The DataPortability project's mission is to advocate interoperable data portability for users, developers and vendors. Length Microblogs are, well, micro. They are shorter. This is not some marvelous invention - it is a simple, imposed limitation on the input field. Any publishing software today, from WordPress to Drupal, can be modified to force users to stick to 140 characters - call it "microblogging mode". I don't think this particular difference (or how to bridge it) warrants much more explanation. Real Time While blogs used to update rather slowly in a publish and subscribe model, microblogging has had a reputation for being faster or real time. The old school refresh rate of 15 minutes or more (the time between RSS refreshes) seems like an eternity these days. Of course the reality is that the Twitter API is still incapable of sending updates to individual clients in real time, and the whole thing is far from real time. Updates in seconds, however, is a key trait of microbogging. The fact is, however, that blogs now have a method of pushing updates that's faster and more effective than even the Twitter API. It's an open standard called PubSubHub and it's supported by both Blogger, WordPress, Buzz and countless other smaller services. Blogs are already real time. Identified Subscriptions One of the nice things that Twitter does that traditional Blogging software does not do is called Identified Subscriptions. That is, when you subscribe to (a.k.a follow) a user, their name and face appear in your sidebar, and you get a nice little ego boost in the form of a notification email and increase in your follower count. Why couldn't we add a simple mechanism to PubSubHub so that when a client subscribes to push updates, it leaves behind some optional identifying information about the user like their name and avatar? Or maybe instead of leaving the actual username and avatar, it might provide a URL to the subscribing user's own microblogging site that has that metadata stored in the header. Addressability This is perhaps the most complicated difference and gap to close. With Twitter, you can easily say, "Hey @chrissaad you are are a crazy hippy" and I will get it in my message stream. Blogs can't do that right? Well, actually, blogs have been doing addressability since day zero. The same way the rest of the Web does addressability - using links. Bloggers frequently link to each other and then check their trackbacks and pingbacks for incoming references. The only problem with this model is that it's not user friendly enough. Mainstream users don't understand URLs and checking pingback and referrer logs is just plain silly. So rather than reinvent the wheel, why not just add rubber? To make it easier for users, imagine if blogging software kept track of the users you were following (see Identified Subscriptions above) and when you type the equivalent of "@", they provided a list of suggested aliases to choose from. When you select the person you are addressing, the software could insert the alias and hyperlink the name to the associated URL of that user's microblogging site. Clients, then, could subscribe to Google Blog Search (remember blog search is essentially the blogging world's open firehose) and search for any reference to your personal URL. The rest is just presentation tricks to show those replies mixed in with the rest of your microblogging items. Clients Why can't existing Twitter clients allow users to subscribe to PubSubHub enabled RSS and Atom feeds. They would also subscribe to the Google Blog Search for references to your own URL (for @ replies). No need to rip and replace Twitter, just offer an open alternative: subscribe to any site - anywhere. The Future As you can see here, microblogging is and could be fundamentally the same as blogging in terms of the mechanics and technologies involved. The techniques used to build and improve the open blogosphere could be used to bootstrap a microblogging sphere as well. There have been many big strides in this area, such as Status.net. The opportunity now is for the (ex?) Twitter clients and blog publishing platforms and the standards groups to make small tweaks to extend the technology in the right way. Discuss

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Microblogging vs. Blogging: 5 Ways to Create an Open Twitter Alternative

E-Books on the iPad: iBooks vs. Kindle for iPad

cgseo — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 23:58:25 +0000

Ever since Steve Jobs first announced iBooks for the iPad, pundits have been wondering about the future of the Kindle and similar e-book readers in the face of this new competition. Now that we actually have access to an iPad , we had a chance to take a closer look at both the iBooks and Amazon's Kindle for iPad apps. We are still waiting for the B&N iPad app, but both iBooks and iPad for Kindle already highlight the iPad's potential as an e-book reader. Sponsor iBooks It doesn't come as a surprise that Apple managed to develop the prettier e-reader app. Switching from the iBooks store - which looks a lot like the App Store - to your bookshelf is done through a nifty animation. Newly downloaded books and samples smoothly slide into the bookshelf and thanks to a faux 3d look and a page-flip animation, the app itself mimics the look and feel of a book. When you click on a book in your shelf, it flips open and zoom to the page you left off. Flipping the iPad to landscape mode switches iBooks from displaying on page per screen to a more book-like two-page view. Given how wide the iPad's screen its, this makes it a lot easier to read as the individual lines are much shorter. With regards to customization, iBooks allows its users to change the size of the font, but also the font itself (Baskerville, Cochin, Palatino, Times New Roman and Verdana). You can also set the screen brightness right from within any book, which is great for reading at night. As far as we can see, however, you can't switch to white text on a black background. Another neat feature is the search function that feels a lot like Spotlight on OSX. This search feature is extremely fast - though sadly it only works for the book that you are currently reading. You can't search through all of your library, though you can initiate a Google and Wikipedia search from within any book (these open up Safari, however). The iBooks app can also read DRM-free ePub texts. You simply download the e-book to your computer, drag it into iTunes and after your next sync, it will appear in iBooks. iBooks Store The iBooks store mostly features books between $9.99 and $14.99 (with a few outliers). There are currently about 30,000 free books in the store (courtesy of Project Gutenberg) and about 60,000 books from most major publishers - though there are still some holdouts . Every book in the store allows you to download a free sample (sometimes more than 50 pages long). Kindle for iPad Amazon, of course, offers a far larger store than Apple. With close to 450,000 paid and free books. It's worth noting that the Kindle store also launched with slightly more books (about 88,000). Compared to iBooks, Kindle for iPad feels a bit more pedestrian, as it doesn't feature fancy animations. Pages just slide left and right and instead of two-page view when you flip the iPad to landscape mode, you just get a single page with a very wide layout. The Kindle app also doesn't allow users to customize the font of a book, though it does offer the standard screen brightness and font size settings. Unlike the iBooks app, which only has a bookmark feature, the Kindle app allows users to annotate books and highlight passages in these texts. For students, this is a must-have feature and it's surprising that Apple didn't include this in its app. As with its other mobile apps, Amazon forces its readers to download apps from the Kindle online store. The only way to access this is through the browser. Here, Apple's ability to integrate the store into the e-reader application is a big plus. Verdict: iBooks is the Better App; Kindle is the Better Platform In terms of functionality, the choice between the two apps depends on your needs. If you need to highlight and if you want to take notes, then the Kindle app is the only way to go. If you just want to read, the iBooks apps is just fine. Prices in both the iBooks and Kindle store are likely to be very similar - especially now that Amazon is slowly giving up on its idea of selling all e-books at $9.99. The real advantage of the Kindle app is that you can read and sync books with more devices. You can start reading a book on the iPad at home or on the plane, for example, and then continue reading on your iPhone while you are waiting in line at the post office. Chances are that Apple will launch an iBooks app for the iPhone sooner or later, but until then, investing in Kindle books seems like a smarter decision as you don't lock yourself completely into Apple's smaller ecosystem. More About the iPad Launch Click here for our full archive of posts about the iPad launch . Discuss

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E-Books on the iPad: iBooks vs. Kindle for iPad

Twitter Highlights Popular Tweets, Goes Live With API

cgseo — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 15:48:28 +0000

Twitter turned on its new "popular" tweets feature in its search page last night, bubbling the three most popular tweets to the top of any search result. Previously, search results were only offered according to time, not any form of relevancy. In addition to the search feature showing up on search.twitter.com , the functionality has been turned on in Twitter's search API, so we're likely to see this sort of thing showing up in third-party clients soon, as well. Sponsor Don't be confused if popular search results aren't showing up when you search directly from the Twitter homepage - you need to specifically go to search.twitter.com for these new results to come up. For some reason, searching from the right-hand sidebar gives only results ordered by time. From the Twitter API Google Group on how tweets will be ordered: With this new project, we want to make real-time search even more valuable by surfacing the best tweets about a particular topic, by considering recency, but also the interactions on a tweet. This means analyzing the author's profile, as well as the number times the tweet has been retweeted, favorited, replied, and more. It's an evolving algorithm that we'll be iterating on & tuning until practically the end of time. While the Twitter search returns only three results, the API should return more if desired. The API is opt-in, as we wrote last time , and offers the ability to get only new results, only popular results, or a mix. We're immediately wondering how this might be used with the geocoding variable. Will we see similar functionality to the location trending on Foursquare or Gowalla? What does mean to identify tweets as singular hubs of conversation, like we see with Techmeme? Trending topics are just that - topics surrounded by many tweets. This makes the focus center not around many people talking about a topic, but instead a few tweets that many people are centering around. We know we've seen similar implementations with the likes of TweetMeme , but now that it's in the API, what will we see next? Discuss

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Twitter Highlights Popular Tweets, Goes Live With API

Wolfram Alpha is Coming to the iPad and E-Books

cgseo — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 21:10:24 +0000

Yesterday, Wolfram Alpha announced the price drop of its iPhone app and the return of its mobile site. Today, after Apple itself broke a press embargo that was originally set for Saturday, Wolfram Alpha is also announcing the launch of its iPad app, as well as the launch of its new Wolfram Alpha for e-books program. The fact that Wolfram Alpha would launch an iPad app - which will retail in a bundle with the iPhone app for $1.99 - doesn't really come as a shock. The e-book program, however, comes as a bit of a surprise, but makes perfect sense in light of Wolfram's new push towards making Wolfram Alpha ubiquitous. Sponsor Wolfram Alpha for E-Books The first application to make use of Wolfram Alpha for e-books is the visually stunning iPad version of Theodore Gray 's best-selling The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe . The e-book application integrates Wolfram's computational knowledge engine closely into the e-book experience. It's easy to imagine calculus, engineering or geography textbooks that will also make use of Wolfram Alpha's vast data repository and its ability to manipulate this data. For now, the company is remaining relatively quiet about the exact details of the program, however. The full launch is scheduled to happen later in Q2 2010. As Wolfram Alpha's managing director Barak Berkowitz noted yesterday, the team's "number-one priority as of today is to get Wolfram|Alpha in the hands of everyone." This new e-books program is clearly another move in this direction. Wolfram Alpha iPad App Wolfram Alpha's newly affordable iPad app will make good use of the extra screen estate on the device. It will use a two-pane view, which looks like it will become a standard interface for many iPad apps. A sidebar on the right will feature your search history, examples and favorites, while the left side will display your results. We will take a closer look at the app once we can test it ourselves. Discuss

Google Introduces Search Funnel, Ad Innovations

cgseo — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 03:00:00 +0000

Today Google introduced two new elements to its popular advertising system, a Search Funnel and something it is calling Ad Innovations . The company's VP of product management, Susan Wojcicki, described the Search Funnel as a "set of reports describing the Google.com search ad click and impression behavior leading up to a conversion." Sponsor The idea is that users of the Sales Funnel will, over time, tighten and focus their use of Google Ads to such a degree that they will be able to sell a grommet to an Albanian from outer space. "The data you see in Search Funnels can help you understand how users search for your products before converting so that you can optimize these conversion paths." Ad Innovations is a specialist website Google has set up to "work closely with advertisers on what comes next." They intend to use the space to debut ad-tech ideas and solicit user feedback. Photo by Danny Sullivan. Discuss

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Google Introduces Search Funnel, Ad Innovations

TechStars’ Andrew Hyde Launches Freelance Marketplace Startup

cgseo — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 00:20:00 +0000

Back in January, a healthy comment discussion followed a post in which we looked at the topic of "spec work," or freelance work done for a client before an agreement of compensation is formed. One of the most vocal opponents to spec work is Andrew Hyde of TechStars and StartupWeekend fame, whose blunt opinions sparked a debate over how a marketplace for freelance work should properly function. Today, Hyde and a few friends are launching Pick , a marketplace and directory that connects clients with freelancers. Sponsor Freelancers in fields like design, development, photography, copywriting, marketing and management can sign into Pick and create a profile to share their portfolio and contact information. More importantly, however, Pick asks freelancers to list their work availability and a price range. This allows clients to narrow their search to find freelancers in the specialty they need based on location, availability and price. "The [freelance] process is a mess. There are a ton of freelancer sites out there, but freelancers never promote them because they largely exploit the community. I thought there had to be a better way," Hyde told ReadWriteWeb. "I wrote my solution and said someone should build it, and nobody did, so here we are." Through the creation of Pick and the growth of its community, Hyde hopes to put a dent in other marketplaces which he says are providing platforms for what he calls " exploitsourcing ." With a 2008 post titled "Spec Work Is Evil / Why I Hate CrowdSpring ," and in 2009's " An Open Letter to 99designs ," Hyde has become a leading voice in the movement against spec work and the services he believes promote it. "It is a major ethical flaw of both parties," said Hyde of spec work in 2008. "Some designers I have talked to have escalated this lack of ethics to be on par with some very serious crimes, while other see it as dumping oil down a rain drain. A lot of people don't take this lightly at all." On the bright side of the negativity surrounding spec work, Hyde has channeled his passion against the practice into a new place for clients and freelancers to meet without the worry of exploitation. For startups that need design, copywriting or other freelance services, Pick could soon become an excellent alternative to the more common marketplaces. Having just launched, the service is a bit of a ghost town and is currently invite-only, but Hyde hopes to see around 1,000 users by week's end. Freelancers can request an invite and clients can currently visit the site and browse the available profiles. Discuss

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TechStars' Andrew Hyde Launches Freelance Marketplace Startup