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6 Reasons Why Twitter is the Future of Search - Google Beware

This past week the tech world was abuzz with news of Twitter incorporating search functionality into its site. What this means is that you can now easily obtain trending data for popular keywords, take a deeper look at the topics people are talking about in real time, and find answers to pressing questions that others have already written about. So is this really significant? It depends on who you ask. Some think that Twitter is a Google killer while others argue that Twitter isn’t even a search engine at all. Regardless of which side of the fence you stand, there’s no doubt that Twitter has a bright future with its eyes set on the search market. In fact, Twitter continues to receive millions in funding and recently turned down a $500 million offer from Facebook because of its planned business model of Q&A features and search ads. Who knew status updates could be so valuable? Meanwhile, Facebook has been adding Twitter-like features to try and keep up… So really, what’s the big deal about Twitter? Isn’t it just a social media site used to socialize with friends? Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, goes as far as to call it the “poor man’s email system”. But the people who really get it understand the huge potential that lies within Twitter. Not only is it a way to connect and interact with others, but it also represent a huge pool of information based on everyday human life that’s ready to be mined to extract real value. Adding search functionality is just the first step in this process. Not to mention that Twitter already has an impressive track record with various uses. For example, it helped President Barack Obama with his presidential campaign, got a student out of an Egyptian jail, documented plane crashes in real time, and made Dell a million dollars. Twitter has a huge cultish following and is promoted through a grassroots movement that we haven’t seen since…well, the beginning of Google. Despite all of the hype, Twitter is still in its infancy and it’ll be years, maybe even a decade, before it develops the technology to accurately display search results and put a dent in Google’s market share. But regardless of all that, the point I want to make in this article is that Twitter has what it takes to get there. In other words, Twitter represents the future of search. Still not convinced? Let me explain… 6 Reasons Why Twitter is the Future of Search 1. Takes social to a whole new level Twitter is essentially a continuous conversation that takes place online between millions of people. Imagine the insights you could gain if you were able to record and search through everyone’s conversations. Of course, it’s a lot less creepy than that but that’s the kind of tool Twitter is becoming as more and more people take part and share parts of their lives. Twitter search is the ultimate social media platform and will enable people to get the opinions of others and add context to relevant information. Searchers don’t just want facts. They want to learn more about the experiences of real people they can relate to. For example, rather than doing a search in Google for “best restaurants in new york” and getting a bunch of review sites, you can do a search on Twitter to see which restaurants people are talking about in New York. If you don’t like the results, you can easily ask your network and get personalized answers in real time - which will then show up in future searches on the same topic. Compare that to Google. They’ve been unsuccessful thus far in implementing social factors into the search results via Search Wiki. If you do a search in Google and can’t find what you’re looking for, what are you going to do? Probably ask around on Twitter. 2. Combats information overload With millions of new web pages springing up every day on the Internet, who has the time or attention span to read through it all? We need filters, and that’s what Twitter provides in 140 characters or less. Twitter is great for searching for quick information and even if you’re looking for long articles, there are plenty of people who post links to relevant pages they like. 3. Real-time content In this day and age, nobody wants to wait for anything. We live in a society where we get everything fast and can’t stand for anything else. The same applies to information and news. Until recently, we had to wait for journalists to write up reports and publish them online. Google would then index the pages and show them in the search results, but not after at least a couple of hours. Good, but not good enough. Twitter displays real time streams of news and information. There’s no need to wait, and short of actually being there to experience the events, it’s the next best thing. Twitter has been a great tool for people to broadcast news live from their laptops and mobile phones (e.g. plane crash rescue in the Hudson River). 4. Represents the masses Twitter levels the playing field and gives everyone a voice online. In the “Twitterverse”, information is a lot more representative of the masses rather than of big corporations and personalities who manipulate people with their ideas. Power is transferred from the controllers of the web (e.g. Google, big news companies, powerful Wikipedia editors, online publishers) to millions of everyday social media users. We’d be able to rely less on big news sources and drill down to the micro level (i.e. experiences of individuals rather than just in aggregate). 5. More trustworthy results A big advantage Twitter has over Google is that it has the potential to be both a social media platform and a search engine. Users have the option of getting answers from their network of people who they actually trust. On the other hand, Google gives you a page of links compiled by their quality algorithm. Sure, Google returns pretty good search results most of the time, but they’re impersonal and sometimes irrelevant to what you really want. Getting in touch with your network via Twitter is the best way to get reliable information you can trust. For example, if you had a question about life in the NBA, would you rather ask Shaquille O’Neal on Twitter or type a question in Google? 6. Better targeted for location How does Google know whether or not a page is relevant to a local geographic region? Unless the page is labeled correctly, Google has no idea. Twitter, on the other hand, can easily tie content to a location by using user profile settings or GPS (as technology advances on mobile phones). This in turn means more relevant information and ads in Twitter search.

He said/she said: Flash not coming to iPhone

Boo Hiss ...

So now PC World is reporting that Flash won’t be coming to the iPhone because:

“It’s a hard technical challenge, and that’s part of the reason Apple and Adobe are collaborating,” Narayen told Bloomberg Television at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “The ball is in our court. The onus is on us to deliver.”

Yes, friends, we can send a man to the moon but we can’t add Flash to the iPhone. Flash wouldn’t be impossible to add to the iPhone - the processor is fast enough and there is enough expertise out there to offer some sort of Flash derivative that would work on the iPhone without many problems.

This actually most probably similar to the hemming and hawing that we saw on Apple’s side with their plan not to release an official SDK and instead encourage folks to make web applications (we all saw how well that turned out.) Flash for iPhone is probably being prepared as we speak but no one is allowed to talk about it let alone give a timeframe for completion.

Facebook’s Monetization Plan? Polls. And Lots Of Them

Facebook finally has a plan on how to monetize its vast user base: according to the Telegraph, they will allow market research companies to poll Facebook users on various details of their personal life.

Yes, that means your sexual orientation, your interests, your habits - everything you ever did on Facebook will be up for grabs. And Facebook will be making a lot of money out of it. However, it’s not nearly as bad as it sounds.

The initiative is called Engagement Ads, and it was demonstrated at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Basically, it’s the next step in market research; instead of those boring telephone polls which most people don’t bother to answer anymore, now we’ll have Facebook polls, which are only slightly less annoying, but it’s still better than, say, Facebook just selling access to their database to market research people. The polls will merely show up in your feed; whether you want to answer them or not is up to you.

At first glance this is nothing special: polls, right? You have those on every site in existence. However, what Facebook can do, is precisely target certain demographics; for example, it can serve a poll only to Canadian girls between 20 and 25 years of age. Not everyone on Facebook gives their real details, but I’m guessing the percentage of users who answer truthfully when asked about name, age, residence, and other personal info, is high enough for Facebook to have a solid foundation for market research.

Once again, this proves that Facebook has a much better monetization strategy than competing social networks; as many have guessed, they’re methodically turning their user base into a huge marketing tool. Remind me again, why am I a part of all this? Ah, yeah: because Facebook is fun and addictive. That’s how you do it, folks.

Netbooks could be the next hit cell phones

AT&T looks to sell mini-laptops, bundled with wireless data contracts, for prices like $99 or less. Is the gambit brilliant or foolhardy?

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(Fortune) -- Glenn Lurie knows Silicon Valley better than most telecom industry types. As AT&T's point man on the iPhone, he was the guy who camped out in Cupertino and hashed out the blockbuster iPhone launch with Apple. The next big game in his sights? The netbook.

That's right, the netbook, that shrunken, low-priced laptop that lately has been a rare bright spot in the moribund PC industry. To hear Lurie tell it, AT&T's next hit phone might not be a phone at all, but a netbook with built-in Internet access that works anywhere you can get a cell signal.

Get ready for the clincher: Sign up for a two-year contract, and you might get your new PC for $99 or less.

The upshot is that the "free phone" phenomenon that helped make handsets ubiquitous in the U.S. isn't just for phones anymore. The first signs of change came this past holiday season when, working with AT&T (T, Fortune 500), Radio Shack offered a $99 deal on an Acer netbook, a promotion that went "extremely well," Lurie says. "That Acer one's a great example of how partnerships are going to work. That was Radio Shack coming to us saying, 'We've got an idea. Can you help us?' "

As president of AT&T's new Emerging Devices division, Lurie hopes to do a lot more of those deals. His mission is to get just about everything except phones connected to AT&T's broadband network -- laptops, GPS devices, cars, games, medical equipment, "all the way to dog collars," he quips.

It's only January, but he's off to a fast start. At the annual Consumer Electronics Show gadgetfest earlier this month, Lurie teamed with Sony (SNE) and Dell (DELL, Fortune 500) to announce that a new Sony camera will use AT&T's wireless network to automatically upload photos, and Dell will discount its $449 Inspiron Mini 9 netbook to $99 when buyers sign up for an AT&T data plan. (Of course, there's a catch: The price gets to $99 only after a $349 mail-in rebate, so you've got to front the money and trust the fickle Rebate Fairy to follow through.)

Why is AT&T helping to fund netbook discounts? Well, such deals have already proven popular in Europe and Asia, and U.S. carriers are looking for effective ways to lock customers into data contracts. Even in this tough economy, carriers are spending billions to boost their network speeds and out-duel the competition. But the carriers know bragging rights to the fastest data connection aren't worth much unless customers actually sign up. They have a hunch that cheap netbooks will get customers to commit to two-year data plans, just like free phones did for voice.

The plan could backfire. AT&T doesn't know yet whether netbook users will prove to be as loyal (and profitable) as, say, iPhone users. If they're not, the discounts could turn out to be a waste of money. And there's certainly no guaranteed that even the lure of a cheap netbook will get the masses to increase their monthly phone bills in the midst of a punishing recession.

But the titans of the PC industry certainly seem to be rooting for the idea of signing on with carriers. Kevin Frost, who runs the consumer notebook division for Hewlett-Packard (HPQ, Fortune 500), said last year that part of the company's vision is to make laptops as ubiquitous as cell phones, and working with folks like AT&T fits in perfectly.

What about Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500)? Lurie won't offer specifics of course, but during our chat he mentions that he just sat down with Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook a few minutes earlier. Will AT&T ever sell a discounted MacBook? "We're having conversations with lots of folks," Lurie says. "I would very much like to do more business with Apple, and hope that we do." 

Kevin Rose: 10 Ways To Increase Your Twitter Followers

This guest post is written by Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg and the cofounder of Revision3 and Pownce. Kevin, who has over 88,000 followers on Twitter (making him the second most followed after President Obama), also “bloggs” at kevinrose.com. He is an investor in Twitter.

Ten Ways To Increase Your Twitter Followers:

1. Explain to your followers what retweeting is and encourage them to retweet your links. Retweeting pushes your @username into foreign social graphs, resulting in clicks back to your profile. Track your retweets using retweetist.
2. Fill out your bio. Your latest tweets and @replies don’t mean much to someone that doesn’t know you. Your bio is the only place you have to tell people who you are. Also, your bio is displayed on Twitter’s Suggested Users page. Leaving it blank or non-descriptive doesn’t encourage people to add you.
3. As @garyvee says, “link it up.” Put links to your Twitter profile everywhere. Link it on your Digg, LinkedIn, Facebook, blog, email signature, and everywhere else you live online. Also, check out the great feedburner-like badges from TwitterCounter for your blog.
4. Tweet about your passions in life and #hash tag them. Quality content coupled with an easy way to find it never fails. If others enjoy your content, they’ll add you. Learn more about #hash tagging here.
5. Bring your twitter account into the physical world. Every time I give a talk, speak on a panel, shoot a podcast, present slides, or hand out business cards, I figure out a way to broadcast or display my twitter account.
6. Take pictures. Pictures are heavily retweeted/spread around. This one from US Airways Flight 1549 has been viewed 350,000+ times. For mobile pics use iPhone apps such as Tweetie or Twitterific, both which support on the go uploading.
7. Start a contest. @jasoncalacanis offered a free macbook air if he reached the #1 most followed spot. That never happened, but Jason added thousands of followers…brilliant.
8. Follow the top twitter users and watch what they tweet. Pay attention to the type of content they sent out and how they address their audiences.
9. Reply to/get involved in #hash tag memes. search.twitter.com lists the hot ‘trending topics. Look for the #hash topics and jump in on the conversation (see #4 for links to #hash instructions).
10. Track your results. TwitterCounter will show you how many new users you’re adding per day and Qwitter will email you when someone unfollows you after a tweet.

All Things Web 2.0 - VIDEO 2.0

All Things Web 2.0 - VIDEO 2.0.



This is a great site for web 2.0 stuff

What your hard drive will look like in five years

Editor's Note: This story is excerpted from Computerworld. For more Mac coverage, visit Computerworld's Macintosh Knowledge Center.

As solid-state disk (SSD) technology closes in on hard-disk drive (HDD) capacity and price, experts say it may not be long before spinning disks are a thing of the past and a computer's storage resides in flash memory on the motherboard.

By making the drive part of a system's core architecture—instead of a peripheral device—data I/O performance could initially double, quadruple, or more, according to Jim McGregor, chief technology strategist with market research firm In-Stat.

"Instead of using a SATA interface, let's break that and instead of making it look like a disk drive, let's make it look like part of the memory hierarchy," McGregor said. "Obviously, if you break down that interface, you get more performance."

Currently, Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) is the bus used to transfer data between a computer and storage devices, be it HDDs or SDDs in a 1.8-inch, 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch disk drive form factor. SSD manufacturers have been fitting SSDs into a hard disk drive case to fit it into existing computer architectures.

Within three years, McGregor said SSDs with 256GB capacity—already on the market—will be close to the same price as hard drives. (A 256GB SSD for the new 17-ininch MacBook Pro from Apple is a $900 build-to-order option, for instance. A 250GB HDD goes for about a tenth that price.) That will signal to manufacturers that it's time to consider an interface change. And, while SSDs will be lagging behind the 500GB to 1TB capacities of hard disk drives for some time to come, McGregor argues that users don't need that much storage anyway.

"We've already seen this trend in the netbook space, and we will see it more in the notebook platform. Storage will begin to look more like a memory module than a hard drive," said Dean Klein, vice president of Micron SSD group. "There's a move afoot to make it more like a card-edge connector, so the SSD would not have the cost of a mechanical connector. It would just have gold-plated fingers on the edge: No enclosure, just the circuit board."

Disk drive vendors are doubling the capacity of drives every 12 to 18 months, but In-Stat's data indicates that the average storage requirements of users increase in a more linear way. And, while HD video can drive a huge swing in storage requirements, the advent of on-line libraries and storage services tend to even out the trends, McGregor said.

According to In-Stat, SSD prices have been dropping 60 percent year over year. Currently, the price of consumer-grade SSD is from $2 to $3.45 per gigabyte, with hard drives going for about 38 cents per gigabyte, according to Gartner and iSuppli.

"Two years ago, SSDs cost $17.50 per gigabyte, so it's obvious that consumer NAND flash memory will soon be a true contender to hard disk drives—it's just not there yet," Gartner analyst Joseph Unsworth said. "I think you need to get to 128GB for around $200, and that's going to happen around 2010. Also, the industry needs to effectively communicate why consumers or enterprise users should pay more for less storage."

Intel's and Micron's upcoming SSDs are be based on 32Gbit chip technology. The companies are expected to be the first to break the $1 per gigabyte barrier with their consumer SSD products, which will cost about 99 cents a gigabyte, according to Jim Handy, an analyst at Objective Analysis.

Klein argued that using an SSD in its native state, as NAND chips on a board without an enclosure, will reduce cost, weight, power use, and space.

Within the next year, Micron expects to bring to market a high-end SSD that could achieve 1GBps throughput by using a PCIe interface rather than traditional SATA or SAS. The transfer speed is four times that offered by Intel's newest, enterprise-class SSD, the X25-E.

In a video on Micron's blog site, Joe Jeddeloh, director of the vendor's Advanced Storage Technology Center, demonstrated the technology using a two-processor, eight-core Intel Xeon PC and a card with two SSDs and 16 flash channels. A blurry readout showed the SSD reaching 800MBps. throughput, with Jeddeloh claiming that it "will be hitting a bandwidth of 1GBps and at least 200,000 IOPS," or I/O operations per second.

The card was directly connected to a PCI Express (PCIe) slot, bypassing SATA or Serial Attached SCSI interfaces. While PCIe has the same throughput as SATA II—3Gbps—PCIe offers more channels.

Using file transfers ranging from 2KB to 2MB, Jeddeloh demonstrated 150,000 to 160,000 random reads per second in the video. "That's what flash can do when it's managed correctly," Jeddeloh said.

While Micron's SSD technology is aimed at high-end applications that would run on Fibre Channel SANs, such as transactional databases or streaming video, Klein said consumer-grade computers using SSDs directly connected to a PCIe bus with four lanes (x4 slots) could soon achieve similar results.

Physical PCIe slots may contain from one to 32 lanes of data. Currently, PCIe Generation 1 offers 250MBps throughput per lane. The second generation of PCIe is expected out next year and will offer twice the throughput, or 500MBps per lane. While SATA 3.0, expected out this year, also doubles throughput, it only offers one lane.

"Each lane of that x4 PCIe is as fast as a SATA 3.0's 6Gbps bus," Klein said. "So I can be four times as fast on that one slot as an SSD could be on a SATA 3.0 connection. That's really the direction things are going."

Klingon Keyboard: for serious Trekkies only

Are you one of the biggest nerds in the world? If so, you probably know the fake Klingon language from Star Trek. And maybe you want to write things in this fake tongue. But here you are stuck with a stupid English keyboard. What to do? Buy a keyboard with Klingon symbols on it, that's what!

Not only does this keyboard let you type in a made-up language, but it also connects with a PS/2 cable, something no current computers use. So to recap: if you're a super nerd with an old computer and you want to type in Klingon, this is for you. For the other 99.99999999% of the world, we'll stick to regular keyboards. And for those who need their Klingon fix now and then, stick to online Klingon translators.

Boing Boing Gadgets, via Ubergizmo

         

Wooden Animal USB Drives

The Japanese company Marubeni InfoTech has released a beautiful line of wooden USB drives that looks like animals - kind of like a playful version of those “realistic” looking Animal USB Drives that we saw earlier this year.

These drives features a 1GB storage capacity and there are five animals to choose from: dog, pig, elephant, hippopotamus and sawn - each available in maple or walnut.

The Wooden Animal USB Drives are available for 7,980 Japanese yen (about $73 USD) a pop from the Marubeni InfoTech website (the page is in Japanese).

USB 3.0 Almost Here, but Apple Jumped the Gun

There’s pretty universal consensus in the Mac portable community that Apple jumped the gun in dropping FireWire support from the new unibody MacBooks, with nothing adequate to replace its full functionality. Sure, you can transfer and backup files reasonably efficiently over a USB 2.0 connection, but you can’t boot your Mac (at least conveniently and dependably) from an OS X install on a USB drive, and USB has nothing at all to replace FireWire Target Disk Mode.

For a concrete example of what a huge deficiency that is, over several days last week I booted and ran my G4 PowerBook from a clone of my hard drive and system on an external FireWire drive while I dealt with a stubborn issue afflicting the OS X Leopard install on its internal hard drive. If a similar issue cropped up with one of the new, FireWire-less Macbooks, dealing with this problem would have been far more difficult, inconvenient, time-consuming, not to mention disruptive of my be ability to continue using the machine for production work in the meantime.

I would like to think that Apple has listened to the howls of dismay over their misbegotten decision, and will restore a FireWire port on the Revision B unibody MacBooks. After all, the original Clamshell iBook was initially released without FireWire support, but it was added with the final revision of that model. However, that was in 2000; this is now, and I’m not inclined to be holding my breath waiting for Apple to blink on this.

One reason is that USB 3.0 is coming. Now I hasten to emphasize that there is no indication I’m aware of that USB 3.0 will support any analog of FireWire Target Disk mode, but there is probable cause to imagine that Apple may be working on making it conveniently bootable. The MacBook Air, for example, can boot from its optional proprietary external USB optical drive.

A company called Symwave Inc. demonstrated what it claims to be the world’s first consumer application of SuperSpeed USB 3.0 at the Computer Electronics Show at Las Vegas last week.

USB 3.0 will reportedly be about 10 times faster than USB 2.0 with a maximum throughput of 4.8 Gbit/s, which should make it faster than even FireWire 800, which is still supported (plus FireWire 400 through an optional adapter) by the unibody MacBook Pro.

Symwave says it is collaborating with leading test, cable, components and hard drive manufacturers to demonstrate the transfer speeds of USB 3.0 and will showcase streaming data to and from external storage devices at speeds previously unattainable, predicting that SuperSpeed USB 3.0 is poised to become the most pervasive high-speed connectivity technology over the coming years, and it is backwards port compatible with the more than 10 billion USB devices shipped to date.

Presumably, Apple will be getting on board with USB 3.0, and it should be an exciting technological advance in some ways, but they still were too quick pulling the plug on FireWire with the MacBook.