‘Find My Face’ is a new feature that has been developed by Google+ to enable users to tag people in their photos. It will work in the browser version of Google+ and is very similar to Facebook’s already established feature that suggests tags for individuals in photos. However, the difference between the two is that Facebook does not require user consent for the tagging, while Google+ does. Users on the latter social network can ‘tag’ someone in one of their photographs and the tag attaches the person’s name to their face in the photo. If a user has been tagged in this way in someone else’s photo, then they will be able to see it on their profile so that they are aware when someone adds photos that include them.
Possession of Facebook’s similar photo tagging feature is default for all users, however those who have a Google+ account have the option to accept or to reject a tag, as well as being able to disable the feature altogether. So if someone has been checking their e-mails or playing on www.partypoker.com and they decide to check their Google+ account, they will not find that they have already been tagged in photos that they do not like. They will have the option to decide whether they want to be tagged or not.
It is still unclear whether Google will be releasing a version of this application for Android OS and the introduction of it into accounts is taking place slowly. However, it is likely that users will eventually see this application made available for Android OS and that all users will become familiar with it. It seems that Google first wants to make sure that this new feature can integrate seamlessly into the world of Google+, so that users will be happy with it.
A small mistake can waste all your efforts. It could happen to anyone, even large companies like Google. You might have received an email notification about the Google +1 button campaign announcing that the code is now public, just grab it and put it on your website.
You might have even tried to click on the blue button “Get the code!” and just got a 404 Error saying that the requested page was not found.
If you examine carefully the url, you find a typo in the word button which was written with a single “t”
How long do you think it will take for Google team to discover the mistake and fix it? Do you think they will resend the email notifications or just make a fix to the wrong url and make it redirect to the correct one?
Update Jun 2, 2011: The link with single “t” is now redirected to the correct url. Case Closed !
I have noticed the Google is promoting Webmaster Tools on search queries of the format “site:domain.tld” and it makes sense since such a campaign would be targeted to webmasters. I mean why would a normal user be looking for how many pages are indexed for a certain domain?
Anyway, what I found a bit funny is that you see the promotion even for some google domains.
Do you own google.se? Get indexing and ranking data from Google.
I wonder how many would actually click on that ad !
Google Instant is the new homepage makeover to Google Search Engine. This search enhancements allows you to see results as you type your query. Based on ajax technology, the query is sent to Google’s servers for each letter you type. By pushing the limits of their technology and infrastructure, Google is aiming to help the user get better and faster search results because of the fact that people type slowly but read quickly, I think it’s an overkill.
What I think Google is not taking into consideration here is that the majority of “slow typing” people are not even looking at their screen while typing to even notice that the search results are updating but are searching for the keystroke on their keyboard and will not be looking at the screen till they hit the enter.
It looks like the Google Buzz feature roll out has been a great success for Google as they are applying once again the same strategy on Google Voice: Just Stuff it in Gmail.
It really makes sense to use such a large loyal user base for mass roll out at the same time without the need to fill applications and get familiar with a new platform from the end-user side.
As of today, you can call any phone from within Gmail. You will need to install the voice and video plug-in
According to Google, calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free in 2010 and low rates on international calls ($0.02 per min to major european countries including the U.K., France, Germany as well as China and Japan. You can check the complete Google Voice calling rate here.
It’s been hyped for the last 15 hours all over the internet about Justin Bieber song U Smile getting slowed down 800% resulting in a 35 min epic music. What’s the big deal?
Even Shamantis, the author of this music work, is not fascinated by what he did, not claiming “to be any sort of MY OWN talent resonating. All I did was put the song through Paulstretch. Anyone can do that” as he posted on soundcloud
and here’s the original version
The slowed down version went viral with over 500,000 plays in less than one day, but there are actually 2 other players in this story that got hyped even more.
Of course, Justin Beiber himself because it’s obvious that one would want to listen to the original song and since most people haven’t heard about it earlier so you can image the number of hits and searches.
The other player happens to be PaulStretch, the open source software which was used to create the slowed down version.
Here you can see the trend
Every year I wait April 1st to see what the team at Google have come up with ideas. PigeonRank, Google writer, Gmail paper, … were interesting and innovative and shows that Google puts efforts into creating April fools themes. This year, it was more like a disappointment.
Missing vowels from Gmail’s login page
Another prank was Google changing their name on the search engine to TOPEKA !
Now this one is more of political aspect than humor. Perhaps a Google response to “Think Big Topeka” and the huge campaign that the community of Topeka has started to attract Google’s attention to bring the 1 Gbit Fiber experiment.
Octazen Solutions is a two employees startup company in Malaysia developing a contact importer software that allow sites like Facebook to grow exponentially in users. A feature like Friend Find where a registered user, by simply entering his email address and password, will be able to send an invite to his entire contact list. No wonder that Facebook has more than 400 million users where 250 million added in the last year alone.
Last week, Facebook acquired Octazen Solutions. This “talent acquisition” as described on GigaOM, means that Octazen engineers are going to shutdown their business operations to join Facebook as it says on the company’s website. Read more…
Google launches a new set of services this week that will challenge many startup companies core products as Gigaom puts it. I see it as a good move for the benefit of technology because Google is one the companies that have the means to make a change at a large scale. Startup companies had the features for a while but the end users didn’t know about them. It is true that the competition is harder now in the mobile application marketplace but very important to see significant improvements. Here is an initial list of the features launched by Google: Real time search
They have integrated public updates from Twitter, Facebook Pages in the results pages. Updates from MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and identi.ca will be also available.
Google Goggles Google Goggles is a visual search app for Android phones that will allow web search using pictures from the mobile camera. More information about this service is available here.
Voice search
So far the supported languages are English, Mandarin and now Japanese and will soon support more languages. This is a very interesting feature because it will boost mobile web usage. As I explained in an early post, typing text on a mobile device is not cool. In the end, Google wants to support live language translation in a conversation.
These are interesting services for the end user but this is also means more data for Google from which they can create new revenue streams.
Since the creation of the web, searching for information irrespective of the type has been depending on text input to formulate the search query. This approach was good enough since the information was mainly text based. When media content started spreading drastically over the web, photos and videos and as they say, “a picture is worth a thousand words”, the same keyword approach was extended to index photos, music and videos based on the context in which they appear. Google has proven that this method is successful. And from the user’s point of view, it’s very convenient, because typing text on a keyboard is the easiest way to build a query. However, as we are moving more and more towards mobile broadband, other input alternatives must be considered to build a search query. Despite the touch screen and the great user experience it has introduced to mobile users, it can never be as good as a normal keyboard due to the small size of the mobile device.
Furthermore, a mobile user expects to build a search query even in a faster way than typing text on a PC keyboard, like speech commands for example. Another input possibility in a mobile phone, is the lens of the camera which allows user to get information about photos or views without having to describe it by text. This ambition is not new, many companies have been investing in image recognition techniques for years. To match and identify similar pictures is a hard technical problem but the search giant seems to have an answer: Google Goggles. Read more…
