Facebook announced on their blog today that they are acquiring Instagram for approximately $1 billion.  Instagram currently has around 30 million users, although it’s likely that the majority of those users are also Facebook users.  The move is plainly an attempt by Facebook to maintain its dominance in the photo sharing space – their most significantly engaged service, with users uploading around 250 million photos per day and spending about 20% of their time browsing photos.

It seems that the majority of the Instagram team will be transitioning to Facebook, as per the same blog post mentioned above.  Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO is focused on evolving the photo sharing experience:

“For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests…We will try to learn from Instagram’s experience to build similar features into our other products. At the same time, we will try to help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook’s strong engineering team and infrastructure.”

Myriad Core is a Website Optimization Company

Today Google unveiled “Project Glass: hybrid glasses that act as a miniaturized smartphone wired with hands-free access to a micro display, cameras, microphone, Web browser, and speech recognition.”

Led by Googlers Babak Parviz, Steve Lee, and Sebastian Thrun, all from Google[x], the project seeks to continue the evolution of intermingling man and machine.

“A group of us from Google[x] started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment. We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input. So we took a few design photos to show what this technology could look like and created a video to demonstrate what it might enable you to do” (Project Glass).

Myriad Core is a Website Optimization Company

Many of you saw the Go Daddy commercial endorsing the new top level domain (TLD) “.co” during yesterday’s Super Bowl. If you missed it, here you go:

The truth is that .co began as Columbia’s identifying TLD. However, since they’ve began selling it, Google has decided that they will not treat it as a local domain, but rather as similar to a .net or a .com. Here’s a pretty important Google employee giving us 60 seconds of insight:

It’s probably not the case that Google treats the .co as significantly as a .com, but the facts are that they are publicly talking about it as well as integrating options for it into their webmasters tools which should signal to site owners and publishers that the .co can be a trustworthy TLD for their next internet initiative.

Myriad Core is a web development agency

What do Microsoft’s Bing, Apple’s Siri, and and the baddest flight search application on the planet have in common? They’re all in some capacity supported by Champaign, Illinois’ Wolfram Research via their answer-engine, Wolfram Alpha.

WolframAlpha is “an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine might” (Wikipedia).  How this differs from a semantic engine, e.g. Google, can best be seen by example:

When I ask Google how old Francois Rabelais was when he died I’m returned this

Ask WolframAlpha the same thing and forget about looking through SERP’s for an answer

Any Siri user can easily see how this is such a useful support tool for the virtual virtuoso.

But WolframAlpha has been expanding its worldview beyond third party support and direct computational responses. Yesterday, WA rolled out “Flights Overhead,” a real time flight look up application that uses i.p. location or mobile location services to calculate at a given time what flights are in your relative airspace, where they’re going, and lots more.  The announcement came on their blog, its introduction aimed at the creative wonder in all of us, “At one time or another, we’ve all looked at a jet flying high overhead and thought “I wonder where they’re headed?” Actually answering that question probably seemed impossible before—but if you’re a user in the United States, Wolfram|Alpha can now help you answer that question and many more interesting queries about commercial and other flights” (WolframAlpha).

To use the application type “flights overhead” into the text field

The results screen is so impressive it’s worth showing as much as I can

Using the website on a smartphone is even more fascinating just given the accuracy of GPS, and the site functions great on my iPhone. Here it is using the native Safari app, not the WolframAlpha mobile app

By selecting any of the flights you’re given all kinds of data including arrival time

The implications this type of technology and functionality present for research and other creative applications are only emerging. WolframAlpha’s flight look up technology will tell you about weather delays on a given day, perform currency and time conversions, contrast the departing location’s and arriving location’s cost of living…
http://www.wolframalpha.com/

Myriad Core is a Web Optimization Company

After twelve weeks of field trials, Google+ announced early yesterday that it is now [publicly] available.

The news came at 9:00 AM PST on Tuesday in a blog post on Google’s official blog. Open signups were among the nine new Google+ features that were unveiled:

“For the past 12 weeks we’ve been in field trial, and during that time we’ve listened and learned a great deal. We’re nowhere near done, but with the improvements we’ve made so far we’re ready to move from field trial to beta, and introduce our 100^th feature; open signups. This way anyone can visit google.com/+, join the project and connect with the people they care about.” (Vic Gundotra, Google Senior Vice President of Engineering)

The other new features released yesterday are:

• Hangouts on your phone
• Hangouts on air
• Hangouts with extras (which includes four unique releases – screensharing, sketchpad, google docs, and named hangouts)
• Google+ search
• And, of course, public access – dubbed +Everyone (which I love)

Google+ now boasts 100 unique features that will be rolled out globally today. You can read the whole post on Google’s blog here.

Myriad Core is a website optimization company

I read an interesting study published by bitly recently that I both wanted to share and examine. The study considered the length of time that internet users remain interested in links that are shared across various vehicles, e.g., Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and the rate which that interested declines. Appropriately, the term dedicated to the phenomenon of a link’s fading interest is “link decay.”

Take a look at this image:

The link that the above graph represents is to a story about a baby orphaned otter that is befriended by kittens. The two vertical grey lines represent the period of time that is known as a link’s “half-life.” A link’s half-life is the duration of time in which a link will experience half of the clicks that it will experience over the course of its entire life (life meaning the amount of time it will exist on the internet).  The half-life of the baby otter link is 70 minutes.

The next image represents a link of a different nature:

The title of the above link is “East Coast earthquake: 5.8 magnitude epicenter hits Virginia.” The contrast of the two stories is self-evident. However, the trajectory of the two graphs is surprisingly similar (save the fact that the half-life of this link was only 5 minutes).

Bitly hypothesized that the disparities both in click volume and in link half-life could be explained by the nature of the links themselves, i.e., “with a very timely event” as opposed to the story about an orphaned otter: more people are interested in current events but lose interest quickly as time moves away from the event in contrast to the more universal and temporal appeal of a story about an orphaned otter.

That was only part of the story. Take a look at bitly’s density graph below:

It turns out that vehicle of distribution plays a more significant role than the nature of the content. Popular social sites have a mean link half-life of between 2.8 hours (twitter), and 3.2 hours (facebook). The following remarks from bitly capture what unfolded next, “The surprise in the graph above is links that originate from youtube: these links have a half life of 7.4 hours! As clickers, we remain interested in links on youtube for a much longer period of time. You can see this dramatic difference between youtube and the other platforms for sharing links in the image above.”

Businesses everywhere are constantly attempting to determine what the best vehicles are for delivering their content to their audiences. What we’re learning in the industry is that content distribution strategies need to take into account not just the target audience and the nature of the content, but how the content fits into the chosen vehicle. It seems evident that distribution strategies for content created for the purposes of living for a long time should be carefully distinguished from other, more time-sensitive strategies.

**images are the property of bitly**

Myriad Core is a Website Optimization Company

Facebook is now using facial recognition technology to suggest that other users tag a photo of a friend once they are identified, essentially creating the largest database of identifiable photos on the planet. Facebook quietly launched the program in the US and it is quickly becoming available everywhere. “We should have been more clear with people during the roll-out process when this became available to them,” a Facebook spokesperson said.

Not surprisingly, privacy critics are in an uproar. However, others whom have been historically more liberal, have also been raising their eyebrows at Zuckerberg’s newest brain child. “At the end of the day, Facebook’s facial recognition technology is downright creepy…imagine, a world in which someone can simply take a photo of you on the street, in a crowd, or with a telephoto lens, and discover everything about you on the internet,” wrote PCWorld.

One last notable remark came from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who has openly acknowledged that Google HAD developed facial recognition technology, but did not roll it out on account of innumerable unforeseen consequences.

To turn Facebook’s facial recognition off go to: Account > Privacy Settings > Customize Settings > Things others share > Suggest photos of me to friends > Edit Settings > Disable

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A Quick Response Code (QR) is a type of barcode that can be read by smart phones and other dedicated devices. The code captures information, such as a website URL, and directs the device scanning the code to, in this case, the URL’s location on the internet.

QR’s are used in a variety of ways. Relative to online business, they are used in offline print, e.g. billboards, brochures, etc., usually in conjunction with the landing page associated to the product or service being advertised. For instance, if my company was to release a new print brochure and one of our goals was to increase traffic to our home page, we may use a QR at the bottom of the brochure alongside the typed URL. Codes can be generated on many free websites. Here is a great one.

Below is a working example for the URL www.myriadcore.com:

If you download your smartphone’s QR app, available free at your device’s marketplace, and scan over this image, you will be directed to the corresponding URL.

The many creative ways to use QR’s I’ll leave to you. However, there is a caveat I’d like to point out. As URL’s get longer, the code becomes more complicated, making it harder for smart phones to read. To keep the codes at a reasonable size (you don’t want to make them too small), and at a reasonably simple composition, you can use a URL shortener.

For instance, here is a long URL directing to an image:

http://toonbarn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/the-penguins-of-madagascar.jpg

Using the simple and free URL shortener here, the long URL above becomes this: http://bit.ly/mN3Kas,  which can be in turn pasted into the QR generator to produce a code that is simple, reasonably sized, and directs to the intended landing page.

#Myriad Core is a website optimization company

Sandvine, a broadband networks analytics company, released their report “Global Internet Phenomena” yesterday. The report offers a deep view of broadband behavior via “a representative cross-section of Sandvine’s customer base, which includes more than 220 Internet providers serving hundreds of millions of subscribers in more than 85 countries” (Sandvine).

Netflix stole the show, accounting for 29.7% of all downstream traffic (traffic engaged in streaming data or otherwise downloading data to a computer from the internet), during peak hours. In fact, even averaged over the entire day, and when including upstream traffic (traffic engaged in uploading content to the internet), Netflix accounts for more bandwidth consumption than any other single entity.

Debate over broadband pricing structure has been heating up and is likely to arrive center-stage as companies like Netflix continue to threaten telecoms. Last week, Cable One introduced a metered-data plan, which tiers 50 megabits per second speeds at 50 or 100 gigabytes per month. The Company will charge 50 cents per gigabyte over those caps, the Washington Post reports.  The FCC endorses usage-based pricing as per its “net neutrality” order last December.

For now, the debate between consumer groups, who claim usage-based pricing “is a way to stifle Internet use and keep low-income users off the Web,” and the researchers and lobbyists, who believe that “properly implemented, usage-based pricing has the potential to reinvigorate broadband penetration, at a time when penetration gains have slowed to a crawl,” will rage on. And with forecasts putting on-demand entertainment traffic at between 55 and 60 percent of peak aggregate traffic by the end of 2011, broadband pricing structure may become as pervasive as mobile data plans.

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Google has implemented a setting that allows users to choose the frequency that blogs and press releases appear in their search engine results pages. Regarding news worthy blogs, you may want to ask Google to consider reclassifying your blog as a news source.

The settings for this feature can be found on the Google News settings page:

You’ll also find a new setting that tells Google to refresh blog and press release pages every fifteen minutes.

If you’re ready to “stop being a blog,” you can submit this form, and Google will consider your request.  Google is evasive about saying what exactly they, by default, consider a blog. It seems as if RSS content will put there right out of the gate.

What we do know is that in September of 2009, Google said to use the aforementioned form if you’d like to be reclassified, or felt as if you were “misclassified.” A preview of it is shown below:

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