Sometimes the nicest of people, when faced with the pressure of competition, make evil stupid decisions. That’s pretty much what happened to Google when it realized that Facebook was about to eat its lunch with regards to social data on the web — so it started doing dumb things, like building Google Buzz, Wave and most recently rolling out “Search Plus Your World” which to the rest of the world just looks like “Search Plus Google+.”
Now a bunch of Twitter and Facebook and Myspace engineers (I love it when nerds grow a pair) are gently reminding Google of its original priorities with the ingenious Focus on the User, a bookmarklet that attempts to get Google users their “real” social results. Focus on the User uses Google’s own algorithms to serve up relevant social sites, you know, instead of all Google+ all the time. I’ve tried it, it works, let’s eat.
The best part, and the part that cuts through all the PR bullshit, is this in the FAQ:
Q: I thought Google needed a deal and more info from social sites to integrate them into its new social features?
A: This is clearly not true. The bookmarklet never accesses any server or API outside of google.com. The information has already been indexed and ranked by Google.
You can fool some people sometimes …
Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, and Google+, the company’s extension into the social space. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing...
Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post updates 140 characters long. Twitter “is a real-time information network that connects [users] to the latest stories, ideas, opinions, and news.” The service can be accessed through a variety of methods, including Twitter’s website; text messaging; instant messaging; and third-party desktop, mobile, and web applications. Twitter is currently available in...
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 845 million monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...
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