Mike Arrington of Techcrunch gives a clear video demo of the new social search functionality which Google is testing quietly on random people who are using its search engine.

Technorati Tags: Google, search, social media

Hubdub is a news prediction site which aims to use crowdsourcing to predict the outcome of events. The site uses Hubdub dollars (every registered user starts with H$1,000) to reward those who are correct and penalise those who aren’t and this mechanism is meant to mimic the actions of a real marketplace. Nice Web 2.0 implementation.

Technorati Tags: crowdsourcing, predictions, tools

Interesting moves by Yahoo! to crowdsource (definition) search. This from the announcement on the site:

So what is BOSS?
BOSS is a new, open platform that offers programmatic access to the entire Yahoo! Search index via an API. BOSS allows developers to take advantage of Yahoo!’s production search infrastructure and technology, combine that with their own unique assets, and create their own search experiences. While search APIs have been available for some time, BOSS removes many of the usage restrictions that have prevented other companies from using them to build innovative new search engines.

Here’s a quick summary of what’s available today:

* Ability to re-rank and blend results — BOSS partners can re-rank search results as they see fit and blend Yahoo!’s results with proprietary and other web content in a single search experience
* Total flexibility on presentation — Freedom to present search results using any user interface paradigm, without Yahoo! branding or attribution requirements
* BOSS Mashup Framework — We’re releasing a Python library and UI templates that allow developers to easily mashup BOSS search results with other public data sources
* Web, news and image search — At launch, developers will have access to web, news and image search and we’ll be adding more verticals soon
* Unlimited queries — There are no rate limits on the number of queries per day

Given the supremacy of Google, and the company’s woes this is probably not that revolutionary…. but still, a great move.

Technorati Tags: crowdsourcing, search, yahoo

It’s not every day you get an email from Apple like this one:

We have recently completed the transition from .Mac to MobileMe. Unfortunately, it was a lot rockier than we had hoped.
Although core services such as Mail, iDisk, Sync, Back to My Mac, and Gallery went relatively smoothly, the new MobileMe web applications had lots of problems initially. Fortunately we have worked through those problems and the web apps are now up and running.
Another snag we have run into is our use of the word “push” in describing everything under the MobileMe umbrella. While all email, contact or calendar changes on the iPhone and the web apps are immediately synced to and from the MobileMe “cloud,” changes made on a PC or Mac take up to 15 minutes to sync with the cloud and your other devices. So even though things are indeed instantly pushed to and from your iPhone and the web apps today, we are going to stop using the word “push” until it is near-instant on PCs and Macs, too.
We want to apologize to our loyal customers and express our appreciation for their patience by giving all current subscribers an automatic 30-day extension to their MobileMe subscription free of charge. Your extension will be reflected in your account settings within the next few weeks.
We hope you enjoy your new suite of web applications at me.com, in addition to keeping your iPhone and iPod touch wirelessly in sync with these new web applications and your Mac or PC.
Thank you,
The MobileMe Team

Technorati Tags: Apple

Getty, one of the world’s biggest image libraries, has struck a deal whereby it will offer hand-picked Flickr images via it’s iStockphoto service. According to a post on Thomas Hawk’s Flickr page the deal will initially be limited to 2,500 images.

RBI has made it into the Top 10 in Comscore’s “Top 10 Financial News and Research Sites“. With total unique visitors of 3.87m RBI came just behind “Reuters Sites” who recorded 4.79m. Top was Yahoo! Finance with 18.49m.

Google must divulge the viewing habits of every user who has ever watched any video on YouTube, a US court has ruled.

So reports the BBC. This is a bad thing for the privacy of every YouTube user, but potentially a much worse thing for Google, whose whole business is built on the trust of its users as more and more of their personal data and web behaviour becomes Google based.

Salesforce.com has just released browser usage statistics for its service which is interesting in that the company’s clients are enterprises. What this shows is a much more conservative picture than we are used to: 51.7% of users are still on IE 6 even though IE 7 was launched in October 2006.

As web usability guru Jakob Nielsen points out in his Alertbox newsletter, web users are becoming more, not less conservative. The upgrade speed, which was 2% per week historically, has now dropped 1% per week with the latest browsers, he says.

it now seems to take about two years to move most of the users to a new browser version.

There’s a though-provoking post from Jeff Jarvis commenting on the difference between what people say they are interested in, and what there really are interested it. (The inspiration is the Florida obscenity trial where the defence lawyer used Google Trends data to shine a light on the local population’s real behaviour). His basic contention is that people have always said one thing but done differently and in the world of the internet there is now more visibility than ever of this tendency. This should remind us to spend more time looking at our usage data from Hitbox (or whatever) and less listening to the "experts" in our midst – or even, perhaps, sometimes, our research?

I’ve noticed more and more people lately using online slide sharing site Slideshare.
Another tipping point, I wonder?