Oh Google, why do you do us wrong?

Nexus One support screwups, the Google Buzz fiasco, killing music blogs -- it seems like Google can't do anything right any more

So far, 2010 is shaping up to be the year Google discovered it had feet of clay -- and those feet have been spending a lot of time in Google's mouth.

(Also: This blog is shaping up to be all about Google, Apple, and Microsoft. Maybe we should rename it Notes from the GoogAppSoft -- or not.)

First, there was Google's disastrous foray into direct-to-consumer sales with the Nexus One phone, in which Google learned that, yes, you actually have to talk to customers when they're ticked off; they're not willing to wait until somebody gets around to responding on an online forum. Though Google has gotten slightly better at dealing with complaints over problems with 3G connections and phone delivery, it still hasn't figured out what "customer service" actually means.

Then, Google Buzz: a nice idea, if you spend all your time on the Googleplex and have no life and no secrets. Otherwise, it's just a bit too friendly with the information of relative strangers. Google has revised its Buzz product at least three times since it was introduced last week, trying to quell the privacy storm that followed; it still has a ways to go on that one, too.

On top of those comes a so-far little-reported incident that's been tagged Musicblogocide 2010. Earlier this month Google deleted years' worth of archives from six popular music blogs hosted on Blogger.com -- just wiped them from the face of the InterWebs. The reason? It had received multiple DMCA takedown notices from record companies alleging these sites were sharing music illegally.

Under the DMCA (otherwise known as Congress's boundless gift to copyright holders), a service provider like Google can escape liability for violations only if it acts immediately to remove any offending sites or files. The copyright holder doesn't have to prove the violations are genuine, and the service provider doesn't even have to notify the sites beforehand -- it can wipe first and notify later.

The problem? Some of the sites claim they had permission to share those music files. Worse, others say Google didn't ever notify them -- or if they were notified, the information was so vague that it was impossible to find out where the alleged violations occurred.

The only recourse for a site that's been hit with a DMCA takedown is to file a counternotification -- essentially a claim of innocence -- which Google then must forward to the copyright holders. If the copyright holders don't take legal action against the alleged infringers within two weeks, their sites must be restored.

That's kinda hard to do if 1) you've never been notified, or 2) you have no idea what you allegedly did wrong. In one case, Google has admitted its notifications were insufficient and restored the site. As for the others, it's sticking by its policies and saying the bloggers should have filed counterclaims.

Meanwhile, Bill Lipold, owner of the I Rock Cleveland blog, has been publicly haranguing Google and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (essentially an international version of the RIAA) on Google's own public support forums. He's reproduced emails from record companies stating he had the right to publicly distribute their music. On his new, non-Google-hosted blog, he points out that at least one of the files in question had been removed from his site more than two years previous, which would have been easy enough to check:

If at this point you're drawing the conclusion that neither the IFPI nor Google know exactly what they're doing in these matters, you're not alone. If at any point during the DMCA claim process a human being had clicked on the link and looked for the infringing content they wouldn't have found an mp3, but a 404 with the message, "Sorry, dude. The rockin' has stopped. Please be aware that downloads from I Rock Cleveland are only available for a limited time. You can find more Rock 'N' Roll at I Rock Cleveland."

Google isn't to blame for the DMCA, one of the most spectacularly abused pieces of digital legislation ever created. But it does seem to be getting more aggressive about DMCA enforcement.

Like I Rock Cleveland, most of those other sites have found new homes (so much for the effectiveness of DMCA takedowns). But Google is taking most of the heat for this, and a big part of that is because of how it reacted. It all stems from Google's attitude of "we'll respond if and when we feel like it, and only indirectly via our blog or online forum." It's another symptom of Google's self-centeredness -- the same thing that caused its failure to provide actual customer support for the Nexus One, as well as the entire Google Buzz fiasco.

The G-folk can't seem to see beyond the boundaries of the Googleplex. As Google becomes less of an Internet company and more of a consumer goods company, that myopia is only likely to get worse.

Does Google deserve the beating it's been getting (here and elsewhere)? Weigh in below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, "Oh Google, why do you do us wrong?" was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Robert X. Cringely's Notes from the Field blog.

Source:

http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/oh-google-why-do-you-do-us-wrong-012?page=0,0

Chicago Website Design

Looking Back at Six Months of Yahoo Search

The last six months have gone by in the blink of an eye for the Yahoo! Search team. Since the summer of 2009, we’ve launched an amazing amount of new improvements in Yahoo Search to deliver a more personally relevant search experience. Now it’s even easier to find and explore what matters most to you. We made a short video to showcase what we’ve done in the last six months. Here are some of the highlights:

All-new Yahoo! Search

On Sep 22, 2009, we launched a completely redesigned Yahoo! Search in multiple markets around the world. The new page design aligns the experience across our new Homepage, Mail, and the search results page. This dynamic and integrated experience better understands what you are looking for so you can get things done quickly on the Web.

By rebuilding much of the foundational code for the SRP design and core functionality completely from scratch, we deliver a faster Search page with many exciting new features:

* SearchMonkey structured data: You can explore results from key sites and narrow results using different types of SearchMonkey structured data, making it easier to see richer results from an increasing number of sites.
* Search Scan, Safe Search, and Search Pad: You can quickly access search features that make your online lives safer and easier, including Search Scan/SafeSearch (which helps protect you from viruses, spyware, and spam while you search) and Search Pad, our note-taking and research application.
* Query assistance: We’ve extended our powerful query assistance into the left-hand column of the page to allow you to easily explore and discover concepts related to your query.
* Image and video search refiners: We also apply this same design framework to our Image and Video Search experiences, where the left-hand column provides powerful ways to explore the things you care about most; including travel destinations, music artists, movies, TV shows, and celebrities.

If you haven’t tried it yet, let us take you on our tour that explains all of the features we delivered with this new experience.

Structuring the Web

We launched Yahoo! SearchMonkey in May 2008. Throughout 2009 we’ve continued to accelerate the adoption of structured data across the Web and empower developers to innovate in search. In May 2009, we shared with you the key milestones with Yahoo! Search BOSS and SearchMonkey: At that time, we had over 70 million enhanced SearchMonkey results viewed by users every day; and we increased the adoption of RDFa structured data by 413 percent since October, 2008.

By August 2009, we had expanded our coverage for enhanced results to multiple structured object formats including Video, Documents, Games, Products, Local Businesses, Event, Discussions, and News.

Great Assistance across Yahoo!

In November 2009, we extended our Search Assist features from the Web search boxes to the search box at the top of nearly every property on Yahoo! The new features take you directly to the information you need, whether it is real-time stock quotes or movie trailers. This also includes enhanced search suggestions and ways to easily navigate to your Yahoo! property of choice.

Discover Breaking News on Yahoo!

Starting in November 2009, we began including relevant photos, videos, and tweets about a breaking news story within the Yahoo! News Shortcut on our Search results page. By including more of this real-time content, we make it easier for you to find all the information you need about an unfolding news event in one place.

Local Searches Made Easier

We’re focused on making it easier to search for local businesses. Starting in December 2009, we display more Yahoo! local business shortcuts when you search for a business, even if you don’t include your location in your query. We also began providing new functionality directly within the local shortcut to refine results by neighborhood or nearby city right on the search results page. This further enhances an already great shortcut that provides more of the information you care about most directly on the search results page; including ratings, reviews, photos, and directions.

Twitter in Web Search

In addition to our News shortcut that was already showing tweets for breaking news topics, in December 2009 we started integrating recent tweets from Twitter directly as a dedicated shortcut on our Web search results page when you search for buzzy topics. By providing this Twitter shortcut, we make it easy for you to see tweets about topics that may not be in news headlines.

Great Multimedia Search

Building on the great feedback we received, we added even more entertainment refiners within our Image and Video Search experiences. These new refiners help you explore your favorite TV shows and movies, celebrities, or the albums and songs from your favorites music artists. By tapping into the “Web of Things,” we have created intelligent contextual refiners to narrow down your search intent intuitively.

Shashi Seth joins Yahoo! Search

Finally, a very exciting change for Yahoo! Search happened just last month when Shashi Seth joined us as the Senior Vice President for the Yahoo! Search Products team. We’re sure that Shashi will help us keep the ideas flowing as we continue to make Yahoo! Search better and incorporate Yahoo! Search into all Yahoo! products.

We’ve been working hard to not only make it even easier for you to find the information you need, but also to enable you to discover more than you ever expected when you use Yahoo! Search. We’re continually focused on improving the Yahoo! Search experience, so check back often as we bring you more enhancements in the coming months.

Source:
http://www.ysearchblog.com/2010/02/10/looking-back-at-six-months-of-yahoo-search/

Chicago Web Site Design Company

Nokia and Intel Launch New Mobile Operating System

Nokia and Intel will merge two of their mobile operating systems into Meego, a Linux-based, open operating system for everything from advanced smartphones to netbooks, connected TVs and tablet computers, the companies said at a joint press conference on Monday.

The new operating system will combine the best features from each operating system, including the Moblin core and the UI (user interface) toolkit from Maemo. Intel developed Moblin, and Nokia developed Maemo. The first version of MeeGo will ship during the second quarter.

The first devices based on the operating system are expected to arrive during the second half of 2010, according to Renée James, senior vice president and general manager at Intel's Software and Services Group.

The operating system will support both Intel's Atom and ARM architectures. The MeeGo source code, along with the build system and developer tools will be released in the coming weeks, according to a FAQ on the MeeGo website.

The MeeGo code will be hosted by the Linux Foundation, and anyone who wants to develop an application for MeeGo will use the Qt framework. The use of Qt will let users develop an application once and then run it on multiple platforms, according to Kai Öistämö, executive vice president for devices at Nokia.

So far, Nokia is the only company that has said it will ship phones with MeeGo. However, more hardware partners and operators will announce support and product plans for MeeGo in the coming weeks, James said.

The arrival of MeeGo will not change Nokia's plans for Symbian. That operating system will still be used on cheaper smartphones, according to Öistämö.

Source:

http://www.thestandard.com/news/2010/02/15/nokia-and-intel-launch-new-mobile-operating-system

Professional Website Design Services

If Google Wave Is The Future, Google Buzz Is The Present

Google has a problem. Despite having their hands in just about everything online, they’ve never been able to tackle what is a key part of the fabric of the web: social. Yes, they have Orkut and OpenSocial, but no one actually uses them. Okay, some people use them, but not in the meaningful social ways that people use Facebook or even Twitter. Today, Google may have just solved their social problem.

Google Buzz is easily the company’s boldest attempt yet to build a social network. Imagine taking elements of Twitter, Yammer, Foursquare, Yelp, and other social services, and shoving them together into one package. Now imagine covering that package in a layer that looks a lot like FriendFeed. Now imagine shoving that package inside of Gmail. That’s Buzz. If Google Wave is the future, Google Buzz is the present.

FriendFeed Reborn. On Growth Hormone.

Fundamentally, Buzz is a stream of status updates, pictures, links, and videos from your friends. You can “like” these items and you can comment on them. And if you use Flickr, Picasa, Google Reader, or Twitter, you can also automatically have those items imported into your stream. And Buzz will recommend items you might like based on your friends’ activity.

Yes, again, it sounds a lot like FriendFeed. But it has a critical component that FriendFeed never had prior to its acquisition by Facebook: a massive installed user base. Maybe you missed the key bit of wording above: it resides inside of Gmail. Rather than trying to build its own new social service from scratch, Google is making Buzz a key part of their email service (right below the Inbox tab) that 176 million unique visitors each month, according to comScore.

Source:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/09/if-google-wave-is-the-future-google-buzz-is-the-present/

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Are iPhone Hackers Lying in Wait?

Most iPhone owners really don't care about security, according to a new survey by ESET, an anti-malware software vendor.

"We don't see in-depth defense among smarphone users," James Abrams, director of technical education at ESET, told CIO.com amidst a throng of iPhone owners milling around on the Macworld Expo showroom floor in San Francisco.

It's likely these iPhone owners won't take security seriously until the iPhone has a Toyota moment, when a simmering problem finally bubbles over and splatters them right in the public eye. "It wouldn't surprise me if that moment is still a couple years off," Abrams said.

ESET commissioned a survey of a more than 1,000 smartphone owners-35 percent iPhone, 32 percent Blackberry, and the rest a mix-and released its findings yesterday. The key finding: a majority of people don't take security seriously.

Among iPhone and Blackberry users, 55 percent don't lock their smartphone. Some 40 percent of all smartphone users said they're concerned with malicious software infecting their device, while only one in four said they actually use antivirus software, including iPhone owners.

Can iPhone owners even run anti-virus software? "None of the iPhone users should have reported that they are using antivirus as Apple will not approve such software for the iPhone, even though Apple has had to pull spyware off of their App Store," Abrams wrote in his blog. Such is the fallacy of surveys.

Nevertheless, Abrams worries that unsuspecting iPhone owners will have their day of reckoning perhaps in two years. Why so long? He figures hackers are lying in wait, ready to exploit the iPhone.

Hackers might be waiting for Apple to unlock the iPhone for different networks. Or they want iPhones to get into more people's hands. Perhaps they're waiting for a banking iPhone app that they can target. "Hackers don't target for fun," Abrams said, comparing them to the guy who created a worm for jailbroken iPhones as a joke.

Mobile online banking attracts hackers, Abrams said. The ESET survey found one in four users make purchases using their smartphones. Nearly one in three accesses banking websites or apps. "Combined with access to email and social networking accounts is what makes the devices attractive to hackers and other criminals," Abrams wrote.

"It is the adoption of commerce that will create the irresistible opportunity for those with malicious intent," he said.

Source:

http://www.itnews.com/smartphones/14307/are-iphone-hackers-lying-wait

Custom Web Design Chicago

Google to Add Social Features to Gmail

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Google is trying once again to capture some of the momentum surrounding social networking companies like Facebook and Twitter by adding new features to Gmail, its popular e-mail service.

Later this week, Google will introduce add-ons to Gmail that let users post and view messages about their day-to-day activities, according to a person at Google briefed on its plans. This simple tweak to Gmail will allow Google to mimic the status updates that have driven much of the success of Facebook and Twitter, as people return to the services again and again to check out what their friends and co-workers are doing.

To date, Google has allowed users to post only a brief message about their status through its Chat system, which is linked to Gmail. The new features would allow a more vibrant back-and-forth among Gmail users.

It is not clear whether Google will link the new Gmail features to rival social-networking services.

The Gmail move signals that Google remains serious about becoming a social media force at a time when some of Silicon Valley’s younger start-ups have stolen some of its thunder.

“It might look like a minor feature advance, but this is another blow in the war against Facebook,” said Jeremiah Owyang, a partner at Altimeter Group, a technology consulting company.

Google has a full-blown social networking service called Orkut that has proved especially popular in Brazil. It also has a Web browser add-on called Sidewiki that lets people jot down and share information about a Web site, and a Profile service where people can post information about themselves.

These efforts have done little to put Google on center stage when it comes to social networking. Google, in fact, finds itself in a similar position to Microsoft, as a company struggling to figure out how to move into new areas by stretching its traditional strongholds and brand.

Microsoft, a rival to Google in several areas, has invested in Facebook. “You can see the factions starting to line up,” Mr. Owyang said.

Analysts remain skeptical as to whether a new twist on Gmail will do much to elevate Google’s position in the social networking realm. That said, the market remains relatively new, and there is room for companies to challenge the likes of Facebook, they said.

Google is also expected to create strong ties between Gmail and its YouTube video site and Picasa photo gallery service.

Source:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/technology/companies/09social.html?ref=technology

Web Designers Chicago

Macworld 2010 Refocuses For New Era, Without Apple

Attending a Macworld Expo without Apple may seem like going to a rock concert to see the opening acts, but despite lacking the rock star presence, the show will go on nonetheless.

It was just prior to last year's conference, Apple announced that 2009 would be the last year it participated in the annual gathering, which has been held in San Francisco since 1985. This year's Expo, which has been rebranded Macworld 2010, will feature no keynote from Apple executives and no Apple booth on the show floor in Moscone Center's North Hall.

But while Apple's absence will certainly change the dynamic of the event, it hardly means that the show won't go on. There's plenty to do throughout the five-day event, which runs from Tuesday February 9 through Saturday February 13, even without Apple around.

Walking the floor

"It's going to be a smaller show this year," acknowledged Paul Kent, vice president and general manager for Macworld 2010. Last year's exhibition spanned both Moscone's North and South halls. "Many vendors decided to sit on the sideline and see what Macworld without Apple would look like. It's really up to those vendors, going forward."

The exhibition hall, open from February 11 to February 13, remains one of Macworld 2010's strongest draws, with more than 250 vendors, including the Mobile Application Showcase, the largest collection of iPhone developers ever assembled, and the Indie Developer Pavilion, a special area for independent Mac developers of all sizes. Plus, more than 60 vendors are introducing new products at the show. There's no question, said Kent, that the product experience remains a very central part of the show. "The three pillars of Macworld are product discovery, conference education, and the social experience."

Kent freely admits that rebounding from Apple's departure may be a two-year process, but he remains optimistic about the future. "I anticipate the vendors are going to come back in droves."

Naturally, it will help if the conference attendance is high. While the exact figures won't be known until the dust clears, there are more than 30,000 pre-registrations for the event. By comparison, Macworld Expo saw attendance of 45,572 in 2007, and a 10 percent increase over that in 2008. Attendance figures for last year's event, however, were not disclosed. Kent noted that he expects a packed house this year, including the more than 700 members of the media that have registered.

Headline acts

In addition to the exhibition hall, this year's show will have a number of feature presentations that Kent hopes will educate, inform, and entertain attendees. "You don't replace a Steve Jobs keynote," said Kent. "But we do know how to build very content rich events here."

On Thursday, New York Times tech columnist David Pogue will host a session called Late Night with David Pogue, featuring surprises guests and musical performances and noted writer and director Kevin Smith will hold a Q&A session on storytelling, technology, and filmmaking.

Source:

http://www.itnews.com/business-issues/14171/macworld-2010-refocuses-new-era-without-apple

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