The View from Conestogo » facebook

Major Developments for Big Search Players

Rick — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 05:49:57 +0000

August 10 will go down as a Big Day for both search technology and social networking. The most active player was Facebook which announced their acquisition of FriendFeed.

Friendfeed is an aggregator of social network content that allows users to create feeds that pull updates from all kinds of social networking sources, social media, micro-blogging sites (such as Twitter), video sites (such as Youtube) and blogs (such as this one and millions of others).

Along with Facebook’s already developed real time search capabilities, Friendfeed will give Facebook a much greater reach and potentially give them control of a bigger chunk of the overall search market.

Facebook’s immediate target seems to be Twitter – which has also been developing a real time search engine. But Google will be influenced as well. The impact of sites like Twitter and Facebook is starting to make Google’s search territory look old school and even boring in comparison. As Facebook and Twitter become more viable search sources, Google’s stranglehold on that area will be threatened.

Microsoft/Bing/Yahoo are involved in this too, since Bing now provides search not only for Yahoo, but also for Facebook. For more details see Watch Out Twitter! Facebook Launches Realtime Search.

Google Unveils New Search Engine Update

Rick — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 04:16:07 +0000

Here’s a review of the new revamped Google search engine code named “Caffeine” (developer’s preview version) – http://mashable.com/2009/08/10/google-caffeine/

There’s no doubt Google is responding to pressure from Bing.com, the new improved Microsoft search engine which now has new legs since the deal with Yahoo.

They are also responding to the news that both Twitter and Facebook are coming out with their own search engines.

You can be sure the revamp of Google, the new Bing, and the new engines from Twitter and FB are going to change the role of search engine optimization somewhat.

P2 WordPress theme a major improvement

Rick — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 15:13:54 +0000

This new WordPress theme called P2 improves WP a lot… If you are a WordPress blogger you know how aggravating it can be to constantly have to update WP every couple of weeks. Well, finally there is an update that makes a difference.

And this one doesn’t even come from WP.

It’s a blog theme (the one I’ve just switched to) called P2 from Automattic.com, that gives many Web 3.0 features – with features from Twitter and Facebook.

I’ve just changed over, so don’t know the full extent of its features (or problems), but here is what I really like about it:

1. If you’re logged in you can enter posts from the front page of your blog without having to go into the clunky post utility inside the admin area.
2. Posts are accompanied by an avatar – just like in Twitter/FB
3. Comments are nested – you can comment on a comment, etc. and get a real conversation going.
4. Posts and comments are posted in real time with no need to refresh the screen.
5. The default look is nice and clean.

Tell me what you think.