While you were anxiously awaiting the Academy Awards Sunday night to see if you won your office Oscar pool (Jochen Alexander Freydank!!!! Who would have known? ) the world continued to turn and news was duly generated. Here’s some of the news from the search and social media world you may have missed over the weekend.
Q. Are We Not Men? A. We Are Bebo
AOL continues to work overtime at leveraging their properties while trying to shake off their rep as the go-to place for the blue-haired, dentured set. Their latest move is to kick their social medium platform Bebo in the pants by fusing it with their popular AIM instant messaging community to create a FriendFeed/ Twitter competitor. They will support and stream updates from Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and Delicious, even for friends who don’t have a Bebo profile. The race to dominate what AOL calls “lifestreaming” continues. The audience for this right now is relatively small and fractured but with the muscle of AIM that could change.
Run Silent, Run Deep
The New York Times did an ambiguous piece on the “deep web” this morning teasing the idea of a Google competitor below the murky surface but mostly explaining it and crawlers to the masses. Granted there are possibilities out there, but what the article really highlights (and never says) is the importance of good SEO. If there are so many websites hanging out there, un-indexed by the major search engines like so much dark matter in the universe, it’s because of neglect or ignorance. There, I’ve said it.
Meet Prince Namor, VP Technology at Google
On a related note, charges of a cover-up were flung at Google over another deeply hidden bit of data – this time on Google Earth. Users spotted a strange grid pattern off the coast of Africa and naturally assumed that they had found the lost city of Atlantis. Google’s official explanation:
“In this case, however, what users are seeing is an artifact of the data collection process. Bathymetric (or sea floor terrain) data is often collected from boats using sonar to take measurements of the sea floor. The lines reflect the path of the boat as it gathers the data.”
Yeah, right, do they take us for fools? That makes SO much less sense than the fact that it is indeed the lost city of Atlantis. Furthermore it should be obvious that Google holds its search algorithm so close to the vest because they are using Atlantean technology. Google, methinks you doth protest too much!
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