Egg Watchers isn’t just useful as an egg timer, but it’s damn cute in doing it. When you hit the site, you’re given the option of choosing the size of your egg — medium, large, or extra large — and whether or not the egg is fresh from the fridge or sitting at room temperature. It asks if you’d like the egg runny, squidgy, or firm, and gives the time needed to boil the egg properly. Then comes the part that makes it special. Read moar »
Sarcasm isn’t exactly lost on the Internet. Smashing Magazinetweeted this pic today, showing the W3C laying a Twitter-sarcasm smackdown — I guess they’re not quite as dry a group of nerds as I thought they were — and it had me laughing. Then I read that a company in Michigan is now trying to sell a sarcasm punctuation mark. Read moar »
We picked up a new Motorola cable-modem lastnight, and it changed everything. It’s a SURFboard model, but not the common 5-series, this one’s their new DOCSIS 3.0 standard-compliant beast, the SB6120.
Using the old, hand-me-down pile of crap that Comcast originally gave us, we were lucky to attain downspeeds of 10 Mbps, while upload speeds rarely broke 1.8 Mbps, and usually hovered far lower. Many people have beef with Comcast, but fact is, it’s not so much their lines that drag service down in most areas, it’s the modems.
I happened across a wonderful surprise tonight as I went to fetch something using Google’s Image Search. Right there on the front page, sat an invitation to Explore images using Google Image Swirl.
Almost Ready
Google talked about this back in mid-november and even had a rocky preview available for users to try out. Afterwards it was quietly forgotten about by most, and just recently people have begun to see it linked from the front page of Google Image Search.
Clicking the link on the starter page takes you into Swirl, which then nudges you into searching for something. It has a pre-selected list of queries that they use to showcase the technology, such as Andy Warhol, but you can choose your own.
My inbox had a nice surprise for me tonight; Google floated a Christmas present to Gmail users, and it was nice. I don’t mean like closed-beta nice, or anything of the sort — their gift is $20 million in charity to a laundry-list of both national and international organizations.
It seems they’ll never learn. Yesterday, this pop-up introduced itself to Facebook users across the globe, and it wasn’t to the warmest of welcomes, either. Out of the millions of users who see this pop-up, roughly half can be expected to actually follow through with the indoctrination into new privacy features, while the rest will simply click the comfortable-looking “skip for now” button. Some users logged into their accounts and were never greeted with the pop-up at all, even though the changes had already taken place.
There’s an explanation for that — apparently they’re rolling this out incrementally, and it only seems like a full release because of the site’s massive user-base. Facebook’s Ana Muller explains thusly:
If you haven’t yet seen the three-step transition tool for reviewing and updating your privacy settings, you will shortly. We’re asking all 350 million people who use Facebook to go through this process and are rolling out the changes incrementally to make sure it goes smoothly. Keep in mind that you also won’t see the new Privacy Settings page until you’ve gone through the transition process.
These new changes weren’t a surprise by any means, but were actually known and expected; when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently posted his An Open Letter from Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg (I honestly never get tired of saying that, I can’t believe how pretentious that guy is…), he concentrated on the eventual phasing-out of regional networks while only mentioning the privacy update. He pointed to a post from way back in July of this year, which basically talked about Facebook’s willingness to move toward the present privacy-controls as quickly as possible. The whole thing was dragged out and veiled in maybe’s, but it’s happening now. Read moar »
Yes, they’ve finally done it. After months of talk about incorporating the mounds of real-time data to which Google has access, they’re finally piping it all into their own search results. The sources they listed are some pretty big names: Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, MySpace, and Jaiku, among others — and that’s not counting the major media outlets they’ve also tapped to glean time-sensitive information.
Annoyingly, of course, all anyone can say about this (aside from it’s about damn time) is that “Bing must be nudging them to be more competitive.” I can’t help but recall the fact that Google was in talks with Twitter regarding real-time search results several months before Bing ever existed.
Google’s been tailoring search results for quite some time now, and their new Web History, a considerable upgrade to the venerable Search History, has made far deeper personalization a reality. Now they’ve taken it one step further — Google’s enabled personalized search for users who aren’t signed in to Google.
Personalization without Google sign-in is enabled via anonymous cookie, while active accounts benefit from a beefed up version of already extant personalized search results — results now bolstered by location, search terms, search history, and web history. This all makes search results potentially more relevant to users, but not everyone is comfortable with this. I am, but I think I may become slightly more of a minority with every new release/advance/acquisition that Google makes. Either way, for the tinfoil-hat wearing masses out there, it only takes a couple of minutes to disable the whole thing. Read moar »
It’s as easy as entering two numbers in your internet connection settings. The payoff is minimal, but I’m quite happy to be using Google’s servers instead of Comcast’s.
