New Google+ Study Reveals Minimal Social Activity, Weak User Engagement Fast Company summarizes a
new study from RJMetrics that looks at public posts, +1s, replies and reshares on Google+. It concludes "the average post on Google+ has less than one +1, less than one reply, and less than one re-share." Google replies that public posts are a poor metric of user activity; Fast Company replies that "Google has refused to provide clear figures and metrics for its social network's active user base" and links to Danny Sullivan's "brilliant rundown of Google's lack of transparency on the subject" -
If Google’s Really Proud Of Google+, It Should Share Some Real User Figures.
There was also Wil Wheaton's recent angry
"Oh, go fuck yourself, Google" rant in response to a recent experiment replacing YouTube's "like" button with a Google+ button for a small number of users, thus requiring them to sign up for Google+ before they can 'like' a YouTube video.
Is Google Forcing Google+ Down People’s Throats?
posted by mediareport
on May 21, 2012 -
200 comments
A new form of wireless network known as
White Spaces will come online next month, the
FCC announced today.
White Spaces has been called "WiFi on steroids". White spaces are unused spectrum between broadcast television channels. It is faster than WiFi so it can handle more data. It can bring (nearly) free Internet access to the most remote areas of the country, places that can't get WiFi. Because it uses broadcast television signals, any place that can pick up a broadcast TV signal should be able to tap into
White Spaces.
posted by cashman
on Dec 22, 2011 -
34 comments
We expect even more rapid innovation in the web media platform in the coming year and are focusing our investments in those technologies that are developed and licensed based on open web principles. To that end, we are changing Chrome’s HTML5 <video> support to make it consistent with the codecs already supported by the open Chromium project. Specifically, we are supporting the WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open codecs in the future. Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies. - Google's Chrome is will be joining Firefox in
no longer licensing the MPEG-LA H.264 video codec favoured by Apple and Microsoft for use in the HTML5 <video> tag (
previously).
Not everyone is seeing this as a good thing.
posted by Artw
on Jan 13, 2011 -
145 comments
"
On GChat, I type many things – sincere and not – that I would never say in person because it’s easy, when typing certain things into a box, to forget whom you are typing to." From
Thought Catalog, writer Caroline Bankoff lists 45 things she thinks about when she thinks about google's chat service.
[more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue
on Jan 6, 2011 -
34 comments
Despite
very strong denials last week from Google and Verizon that they were not discussing ways around
Net Neutrality, Google and Verizon
held a conference today to announce their agreement to the establishment of price-tiered network services, dividing the current Internet into a "neutral public Internet" that remains "open" (and which preserves access to YouTube and other Google properties), and a set of paid, priority channels that Verizon and other telecoms can use to deliver certain other types of content at higher prices, particularly over cell networks and whatever future infrastructure the Internet will be carried over.
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Aug 9, 2010 -
224 comments
CSS3 Pie. Google's
Frame requires users to install Frame in order to get the benefits of CSS3 support (among other things). CSS3 Progressive Internet Explorer aims to bring support for CSS3 in IE versions 6 through 8 via a server side script. It's early days for the extent of supported properties but there are more to come. If it's ultimately functional and useful long term remains to be seen.
posted by juiceCake
on Jul 18, 2010 -
21 comments
"For the month of March 2010, the city of Topeka will be known as
Google, Kansas." Mayor Bill Bunten says the proclamation is an attempt to
stand out from the crowd, as cities around the United States have until March 26 to tell Google they're interested in participating in the
Fiber for Communities program, part of the company's recently announced plans to build a series of superfast broadband networks across the country [
previously on MetaFilter]. Other cities are trying to get Google's attention, but Duluth, Minnesota, has
upped the ante by pledging to name its firstborn sons "Google Fiber" and its firstborn daughters "Googlette Fiber" in a
video [YouTube, 3:34] spoofing Topeka's efforts.
posted by amyms
on Mar 4, 2010 -
47 comments
This morning, Google launched a new feature called "
Google Dashboard" that lets users view (and in some cases control,) what data is being stored on a range of more than 20 Google services, including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Web History, Orkut, YouTube, Picasa, Talk, Reader, Alerts and Latitude.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Nov 5, 2009 -
59 comments
Two articles from The Economist's Intelligent Life magazine about changes in knowledge production and acquisition,
The Last Days of the Polymath by Edward Carr and
Is Google Killing General Knowledge? by Brian Cathcart. The first deals with the implications of increasing specialization in all field of human activity and the second with whether people are not committing facts to memory because they are so easy to look up on the internet.
posted by Kattullus
on Sep 28, 2009 -
62 comments
Top 100 search terms of the <18 crowd during summer. If you're Glenn Quagmire, don't read this. All others, continue!
An article with at least superficial credibility (they admit kids search for porn, etc.) about what kids, tweens and teens search for online. Randomness includes Megan Fox, Walmart, Youtube and Naked Girls. (And Craigslist. What the hell do kids need on Craigslist?)
posted by ShadePlant
on Aug 14, 2009 -
75 comments
The continuity I have in mind has to do with the nature of information itself or, to put it differently, the inherent instability of texts. In place of the long-term view of technological transformations, which underlies the common notion that we have just entered a new era, the information age, I want to argue that every age was an age of information, each in its own way, and that information has always been unstable. Let's begin with the Internet and work backward in time.
The Library in the New Age by Robert Darnton, historian and Director of the Harvard Library. A wide-ranging overview of the status of libraries in the modern world, touching on such subjects as: journalist poker games, French people liking the smell of books, bibliography at Google, news dissemination in the 18th Century, book piracy and the different texts of Shakespeare. Some responses:
Defending the Library of Google,
The Future in the Past and
Librarians Need a Better Apologetic.
posted by Kattullus
on Jun 1, 2008 -
22 comments
NSA,FISA, and Privacy It is of course the president who finally approves of actions that may or may not be deemed legal but before 9/11, this is what he had been advised to consider "The largest U.S. spy agency warned the incoming Bush administration in its "Transition 2001" report that the Information Age required rethinking the policies and authorities that kept the National Security Agency in compliance with the Constitution's 4th Amendment prohibition on "unreasonable searches and seizures" without warrant and "probable cause," according to an updated briefing book of declassified NSA documents posted today on the World Wide Web.
If this is the sort of reading you enjoy, then by all means dig about here:
But then Windows allowed NSA to have a sure access to your machine .
And by now we all know that
Google will fight the government on making its search data base available in order to protect your privacy.(Reality: to protect Google stuff). And if you worry about search engines tracking you and making data available,
then here is a workaround
posted by Postroad
on Jan 20, 2006 -
16 comments
Google blacklists CNET reporters? An article about privacy issues that highlighted the
potential for abuse if logs of search terms linked with IP addresses are combined by search companies with address and phone data, angered Google CEO Eric Schmidt enough to blacklist CNET reporters for a year, at least according to the bottom of
this CNET story. The article begins with information about Schmidt found via Google searches, and goes on to "question Google's ability to adequately balance the heavy burden of safeguarding consumer privacy rights with the pull toward intermingling and mining data for ever more lucrative targeted advertising."
posted by mediareport
on Aug 7, 2005 -
18 comments
AskGod.com Forget Jeeves. For $25 a month, you can soon call a googling "angel" from your mobile phone with
questions. According to the
press release (pdf): "Soon, with the coming of Ask God, the prayers of all the data-starved will be answered
and the prophecy of information on-demand will be fulfilled." In a country caught in the grips of religious mania, is this smart marketing or tone deaf? And with the web increasingly on our phones already, who's going to pay for this?
posted by CunningLinguist
on May 27, 2005 -
87 comments
Google Blocks Abu Ghraib Images
I went to Google Images to search for it. "Abu Ghraib" brought up only photos of the outside of the prison. Not a single photo from the scandal. Next I searched for "Lynndie England", not a single picture. Next I decided to look for "Charles Graner" her boyfriend who was also prominently features in the pictures, nothing.
See for yourself.
posted by destro
on Nov 6, 2004 -
71 comments
Google To Start Selling Banner Adverts From the that-didn't-take-too-long-department, Google's ad sales VP Tim Armstrong says Google will now start selling graphical banner adverts. One concession to their old mores is that, for now, the banner adverts will only appear on affiliated websites running their
AdSense referral program (as does MeFi), and there is an opt-out. However...
"We have no plans to show images on Google.com", said Mr. Armstrong
"but we are not opposed to it".
posted by meehawl
on May 12, 2004 -
27 comments
