Apple. Ebooks. Broadband. Censorship. The Year in Review Captured On a Google Wave. Explore images with Google Image Swirl, now in Labs. Back in 2001, to give people a new, quicker way to find images, we launched Image Search.
When you do a search for [eiffel tower] you'll find an array of images of the tower in the daytime, in black and white, at sunset and more. With Similar Images, which recently graduated from Google Labs, you can click "Find similar images" to narrow your search to, say, pictures of the Eiffel Tower lit up at night. Today, we've launched an experimental feature in Labs called Google Image Swirl, which builds on new computer vision research to cluster similar images into representative groups in a fun, exploratory interface.
For example, if you search on Image Swirl for [washington], you'll see 12 image thumbnails including President Washington, the Washington Monument, a map of Washington D.C. and the Capitol Building: Once you find the group of images you're interested in, you can click on the thumbnail and a cluster of images will "swirl" into view. Weekend Edition. Google Apps Adds Voice, Maps, Reader & More. Pandas and Lobsters: Why Google Cannot Build Social Applications... - ...ifindkarma... First look at Buzz: much potential, not much innovation yet. Google announced this week the official launch of Buzz, a status and microblogging service that is joined at the hip with Gmail.
It integrates with other Google services and can import data from a number of mainstream websites including Flickr and Twitter. We conducted hands-on testing to see how it compares to other popular social networking services. As social networking aficionados will be quick to recognize, there isn't much in Buzz that is new or original. Google has taken a smattering of good ideas from a number of popular services and attempted to combine them in a way that meshes well with the Gmail experience. The end result is a service that shows promise but lacks the requisite killer feature or innovative twist that it will need in order to truly keep people engaged. Buzz closely resembles FriendFeed, the social aggregation site that was acquired last year by Facebook.
When a new comment is added to an old item, the whole item gets bumped to the top of the stream. Conclusion. Google In Discussions To Acquire Yelp For A Half Billion Dollars Or More. Local Experts share a few spots in Vancouver. Voted the most livable city by The Economist, Vancouver fronts the Pacific Ocean in British Columbia, Canada.
This February it will host the 2010 Winter Games, and beforehand we wanted to share the favorite (or "favourite", for Canadian readers) places of some notable Vancouverites. Vancouver is the first Canadian city we're adding to the special local experts version of Favorite Places on Google Maps, our insider's guides to great cities around the world. For this edition, every expert has been given the same Maple Leaf pin as the city warms up for the Olympics. Take a look at their top Vancouver picks for eating, shopping, playing and more:
Why Google Wave Sucks, And Why You Will Use It Anyway. This guest post was written by Martin Seibert, a German Internet media consultant.
Google Wave is a hot topic at the moment. The ambitious group collaboration and micro-messaging platform started rolling out in beta via an initial batch of 100,000 invitations two months ago. Many people still want invitations. Google aims to "connect" users with shared interests - Ars Technica. Google is improving its service aimed at providing websites with social networking features by making it easier for users with shared interests to connect with one another.
The company has announced a number of new features for its Google Friend Connect that center on collecting and utilizing information about a site users' interests. The new features start off with a several ways to poll users for information about their particular interests. From your Friend Connect account, you can create a poll to ask your users site-relevant questions about what they are into. Then, you can have users answer the poll when they sign in to your site, via a poll gadget embedded in the site, or using the Friend Connect API. Google's new Social Search surprisingly useful - Ars Technica. What if you were searching the Web and there was a dedicated section of search results with relevant content written by your personal contacts?
If you take part in a new "experiment" from Google Labs called Social Search, that's exactly what you'll get. As long as you're logged into your Google account and your contacts have added links to their Google profiles, Social Search will supplement your normal search results with info from those close to you. Why would you possibly want something like this? There are a few scenarios we can think of. Often when you're searching the Web, there's so much information thrown at you that it can be hard to filter the quality of the results—content from your friends is probably more valuable to you than stuff from some random people on the other side of the world. Google Wave simplified.