It’s that time of year again when we see each search engine roll out their top search queries for the year. Scrubbed for pornography and other NSFW stuff, of course. And also manipulated in other ways, like taking out old popular terms, to make sure the list is interesting, if not actually representative of anything, statistically speaking. Here are Bing’s top searches for 2009. I hope nothing important happens in December that will force a revision. Michael Jackson took the top spot, edging out Twitter:
Top Bing Trending Topics: → Read More
Whenever you want to take a reading of the current zeitgeist, popular search terms can tell you a lot about what’s on people’s minds. Right now, for instance, the hottest search terms on Google Trends include “lakewood police shooting,” “tiger woods mistress,” “surviving Christmas,” and “cyber monday 2009 deals.” If you look at Trending Topics on Twitter, however, you’ll see “Soul Train Awards.” I suspect only the first one might make it as a trending search term.
The overlap between trending search terms and Tweets is remarkably low (even if Twitter itself is a popular search term). A couple weeks ago I was moderating a realtime search panel when Vik Singh (the engineer behind Yahoo Boss, soon to be an EIR at Sutter Hill Ventures) declared that only 2 percent of all Tweets match trending search terms. → Read More
It’s that time again – for the ridiculous email of the week award. And while Video Professor really wins this week’s award, we’re going to add one more to the list.
Gabrielle, a student at Drake University’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, writes to tell us that, according to the Associated Press Stylebook, the word website really should be written as Web site: → Read More
There was one complaint I heard over and over again from Indian entrepreneurs during my three weeks shuttling between Delhi, Jaipur, Bangalore, Mumbai and Pune: There aren’t enough angel investors in India.
Now, truth be told, that’s a complaint I also hear in the American heartland, in Canada, in Europe, in Africa, in China and, well, pretty much everywhere I’ve traveled to over the last few years. I’m not sure people ever feel they’ve got enough money being thrown their way.
But there is definitely something that makes Silicon Valley and Israel different from almost everywhere else I’ve been. Both have a wide base of people who made lots of money in the late 1990s Internet boom: The Yossi Vardis and the Marc Andreessens, but also hundreds of lesser known stock option recipients who may not want to start another company, but want to stay in the game $10,000 or so at a time. → Read More
Ever since FriendFeed was sold to Facebook, we’ve been told over and over again that the company and its community were toast. And as if to underline the fact, FriendFeed’s access to the Twitter firehose was terminated and vaguely replaced with a slow version that is currently delivering Twitter posts between 20 minutes and two hours after their appearance on Twitter. At the Realtime CrunchUp, Bret Taylor confirmed this was not a technical but rather a legal issue. Put simply, Twitter is choking FriendFeed to death.
What’s odd about this is that most observers consider FriendFeed a failure, too complicated and user-unfriendly to compete with Twitter or Facebook. If Twitter believed that to be the case, why would they endeavor to kill it? And if it were not a failure? Then Twitter is trying to kill it for a good reason. That reason: FriendFeed exposes the impossible task of owning all access to its user’s data. Does Microsoft or Google or IBM own your email? Does Gmail apply rate limiting to POP3 and IMAP?
So the reason Twitter is killing FriendFeed is because they think they can get away with it. And they will, as far as it goes, as long as the third party vendors orbiting Twitter validate the idea that Twitter owns the data. That, of course, means Facebook has to go along with it. Playing ball with Twitter command and control doesn’t make sense unless Facebook likes the idea of doing the same thing with “their” own stream. Well, maybe so. That leaves two obvious alternatives. → Read More
“Scribd doing 43M revenue this year??” was the subject line of an email sent to me last week, along with a link to this photo, taken in Scribd’s San Francisco offices, showing a list of “important stuff” on a whiteboard. Our tipster must not have read the whole list, though, because I was immediately suspicious.
The items on the list, as best I can read them:
Important Stuff
As you likely know, Tiger Woods was in an accident under apparently mysterious circumstances early Friday morning. Predictably, the reports and reactions thereto pertaining varied somewhat in quality and timeliness, and predictably, this has led to paroxysms of futurist glee in some and sullen condemnation by others. Now that the smoke has cleared, we can examine the event, which is certainly worth a little inspection despite its obvious triviality, with a little perspective. I’m not going to speculate on Woods’ injuries, the cause of the crash, or rumors of fights and affairs. I don’t care, personally. But how the information proliferated makes for interesting dissection. And the fun part is that there’s something for everybody’s agenda! Many will choose to ignore or emphasize unduly one party’s role in this drama, but the fact is that it very neatly exposes both the strengths and weaknesses of both traditional and so-called new media. I hope you’re sitting comfortably. → Read More
It’s Sunday and I want you to be happy. That’s why I’m offering you your very own Vue Personal Video network so you can keep an eye on Santa as he sneaks up to your back porch and steals your garbage cans. We reviewed this kit a few months ago and were impressed. It’s completely wireless and the cameras are battery powered. → Read More
We know that a beta version of Chrome for Mac is due at least by the end of December, but today brings more confirmation that it may be even closer than that. Mike Pinkerton, the guy leading the Chrome for Mac team, has just tweeted out that there are only “8 remaining M4 Mac beta blockers! Go team!”
This means that there are only 8 things standing in the way of Chrome for Mac going beta. “M4″ stands for “milestone 4,” which is how they phrase “version 4,” which the Mac beta build of Chrome will be (the current dev channel version is 4.0.249.12, for example). → Read More
Earlier this month we did a preview of Tweetie 2.1, the latest version of the popular iPhone Twitter client. Today, it has just hit the App Store as a free download for Tweetie 2 owners. While the .1 increment may make it seem like this update isn’t that big of a deal, the latest version actually packs a number of big updates.
Previously, we went over the way Tweetie 2.1 integrates new-style Retweets and Geotagging, but another big addition that developer Loren Brichter was able to squeeze in is new Twitter List support. While it’s perhaps not as obvious as it should be (it’s in the “more” tab at the bottom of the app), Lists are not only viewable in Tweetie 2.1, but you can edit/create them as well. → Read More
Here’s a tip for all you iPhone app developers out there. If you want to make sure your app doesn’t join the long list of rejected iPhone apps out there, make sure it doesn’t advertise a competing product, especially if that product runs the Android operating system. Swavv Apps (creators of Beer Pong) learned that lesson recently when they tried to get their iDroid app past the App Store censors.
The iDroid didn’t do much. It didn’t replicate any Droid features or take over any functionality of the iPhone (that would have made it a worthwhile app). All it did was display the glowing red Droid eye. If you tapped on the eye, it then showed some marketing bullet points about the competing phone such as the fact that it can run simultaneous apps and has a slide-out keyboard (something the iPhone lacks). The second page also shows a picture of the Droid with its keyboard out. → Read More
Website monitoring service InternetVista vigorously measured the uptime and response time of seven of the most popular Internet retail websites from Monday morning November 24 until midnight November 28, to see how the online outlets would cope with the Black Friday madness, traditionally one of the busiest shopping periods in the United States both on the Web as in meat space.
InternetVista pinged Amazon.com, Apple.com, Barnesandnoble.com, Dell.com, Target.com, ToysRus.com and Walmart.com every minute for the entire workweek from multiple datacenters located around the world, in order to find how well the websites were handling the influx of visitors looking for great bargains. Turns out all of them managed to stay online the whole time, with the exception of a brief period of downtime that was registered for the Toys”R”Us website, although notably most of the websites clearly suffered from slower response times at busy times. → Read More
One of the most tiresome group of people you encounter when you write a weekly column is the “suggesters”.
Throughout the week, my inbox receives a steady flow of emails; from friends, from colleagues, but mostly from total strangers – all containing useful links to stories they “assume I’ve seen”. And always with the same suggestion: “you should write about this in your column!”.
Worse than the suggesters are the “trusters”. They’re even more irritating because of their belief that they wield some kind of editorial influence. “Trust you’ll be writing about this in your column this week. Can’t wait to hear your take on it!” they say, blithely assuming that their lack of patience will ultimately be rewarded. Some of them even add a ‘LOL’ to further underline what total and utter wankers they are.
In truth, it rarely pays to indulge the recommenders or the trusters. If a subject has blipped across their radar then chances are, by the time my weekly deadline has come around, it will have been done to death by other bloggers and columnists. By Saturday even the person who ‘couldn’t wait’ to hear my take on a subject will be utterly bored with it.
The perfect example of this is Rupert Murdoch’s “threat” to remove News Corp content from Google, and his “negotiations” with Microsoft to make articles from The Wall Street Journal and the rest “only available on Bing”. It’s no exaggeration to say that the entire fucking universe has emailed me to say how much they’re looking forward to hearing my opinion on the prospect. → Read More
Over the last six months just about all of my tech friends have started using Foursquare, a geolocation-based game that was built by the creators of Google-acquired Dodgeball. Some of them will literally pull out their phones as soon as they enter any restaurant, event or even TechCrunch HQ and check in just so they can be named ‘mayor’ of that establishment (whoever checks into any particular location the most times becomes mayor of that location). It’s fascinating and a bit bizarre to watch, and it clearly shows that Foursquare has tapped into something powerful.
But all this time I’ve had a nagging feeling that Foursquare, at least in its current form, is not going to be the next Twitter, as some people have concluded. Because as good as Foursquare is at figuring out where and what your friends are up to, they can’t hope to compete with Facebook. That is, if Facebook does Geo right.
While the world’s largest social network has been almost totally silent with regard to its plans for geolocation, we’ve been hearing an increasing number of rumors about Facebook finally coming close to launching these features. Such rumors have come and gone for a long time, but all signs point to the most recent batch being true. → Read More
http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/1509319618 Do you know what’s awesome? One of our readers won the Best Buy Black Friday VIP contest. Here’s his story via the Seattle Times. → Read More
The Zune HD has been kick’n it for a few months on retail shelves. But if you’re planning on buying one sometime soon and purple and magenta are your colors, you might want to wait until December 1st. On that day the portable will be available in those lovely colors in addition to the five that are already available. Of course you can customize your Zune HD even more with the signature Zune Original Artwork and through the holiday’s, free engraving. → Read More
If you were a hardware manufacturer and your new phone was a ROMist’s delight you’d be all like “Our phone plays Doom and totally plays Super Mario Bros. 3.” Right? You’d be bragging from here to Scranton. → Read More
So far, I’ve avoided the CFL and LED light bulb revolution. The savings, it seems, come around in the second year, which means that whoever has my apartment next will have a reduced power bill. I could always take my light bulbs with me, but that seems a bit miserly. Besides, my power bill is like $5 a month and 90% of that is my fridge and my desktop.
But these Orbeos OLED lights are as bright and efficient as any LED or CFL, but are both warm, diffuse, and dimmable. I might choose them over regular bulbs just because they have the best of all worlds. → Read More
You can now run Chromium OS, the open source developmental version of Google Chrome OS, on your Dell Mini 10v. Don’t have one? Neither do I, so don’t feel too bad. → Read More
