Pod1 Blog

…With a beta launch to all English language searchers.

Google Social Search is a standard search results page add-on that displays socially relevant content from people in your online social circle, as determined by your Google Profile.

One recent addition includes Google Images, now when you use social search you might see relevant pictures from the people in your social circle. These are photos that members of your social circle have published publicly on the web through photo-sharing sites like Picasa and Flickr.

Looking at the screenshot above, you can see two links for “My social circle” and “My social content.” These links take you to a new interface where you can see the connections and content behind your social results.

- Clicking on “My social circle” shows your extended network of online contacts and how you’re connected.

- Clicking on “My social content” lists your public pages that might appear in other people’s social results.

This handy table from last weeks NY Times lets you see where the big 4 tech companies are concentrating their efforts. Click on the table for the full article

Google has launched a new feature for its Android phone that searches using the camera instead of keywords to identify landmarks, works of art and products.

See it in action below…

Google’s Universal search results now include streams for live tweets, Yahoo Answers & news articles. On top of this they have also announced partnerships with Facebook and MySpace to pull in any real time data that is publicly available. One other useful feature is ‘Hot Topics’ which has been added to Google trends and feeds through the latest results in real time.

This has some pretty major implications for search results and SEO. Take a search for Pod1 for example the results now look like this… Continue Reading

Here is what I have been asked to present in front of some number of knowledge-hungry students of the ‘Social Issues in Computing’ at University of London.

Here is the official line from Google’s own blog and a nice video to go with it which explains what Google Chrome OS is (and what a web browser is as well)…

“we are open-sourcing the project as Chromium OS. We are doing this early, a year before Google Chrome OS will be ready for users, because we are eager to engage with partners, the open source community and developers. As with the Google Chrome browser, development will be done in the open from this point on. This means the code is free, accessible to anyone and open for contributions. The Chromium OS project includes our current code base, user interface experiments and some initial designs for ongoing development. This is the initial sketch and we will color it in over the course of the next year.”

OK I do have an ulterior motive for this post. We have been contracted by UK Scooter-wear Designer Armadillo to promote the launch of their viral video Ad.

The creative team was lead by Amsterdam based Italian/Spanish duo Ham & Kaas and London based production company Stink Ltd, worked together with the British Directing Team Darkfibre to produce the viral.

The Director of Photography, Michael Bonvillain is famed for his work with TV series Lost, Fringe and most recently, the film Zombieland and the accompanying music is from Canadian two-piece, Lullaby Arkestra.

I personally think it’s a really slick piece of work but you can decide for yourself.

Visit the site armadilloscooterwear.com/toughenough or view it below.

(PS There is also a longer directors cut version coming soon which is more of a short film with a new sound track, watch this space!)

Armadillo Scooterwear Tough Enough from Armadillo Scooterwear on Vimeo.

If you find it daunting just the sheer number of social media websites out there then a tool like KnowEm may prove extremely useful. Available with or without subscription the idea is simple KnowEm will simply search over 340 popular social media sites from Blogging, Bookmarking, Design, Entertainment, Music, News, Photo and more then let you know whether your preferred user name or brand name is available with a handy link to the sign up page. The paid for services will even complete the sign up process for you, or you could spend a rainy Sunday doing it yourself.

Google Commerce

Google, has now expanded its online prowess beyond its “Shopping Results”, just in time for the Christmas season. With Google Commerce Search, Google can now pull products from various retailers and e-commerce sites to reduce time spent hunting down specific items while enabling easy comparison.

Google Maps Navigation

Last week saw the introduction of a free turn by turn GPS navigation tool, a certain a game changer in the GPS turn by turn market seeing the stocks of Garmin and TomTom drop more than 20% since the announcement. Available on Google’s mobile OS Android and hopefully coming soon to the iPhone if Apple approves it. With Google’s wealth of information, would we be hearing “Turn left in 15 meters for a special offer on a McDonalds happy meal!”

Google Music Search

Google steps up to challenge iTunes with its new-found music searching capabilities, which will allow you to preview and purchase tracks right from the first page of search results.

Well by all of half a day.

Yesterday morning Microsoft announced, at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, it had signed a deal with Twitter and Facebook to include Tweets and status updates in Bing’s search results. You can see Bing’s results here bing.com/twitter.

Google then came back later in the day with an announcement on it’s blog saying that it had a similar agreement with Twitter the blog stated;

In the past few years, an entirely new type of data has emerged — real-time updates like those on Twitter have appeared not only as a way for people to communicate their thoughts and feelings, but also as an interesting source of data about what is happening right now in regard to a particular topic.

Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results.

There is no reference to Facebook so at the moment it looks like Bing has the advantage. Although ironically when I tried searching for Windows 7 which currently appears as one of the hottest topics on Twitter I got the result below.

In fact the only Twitter results I could see were when I first arrived at the page so there is obviously further work required.

UPDATE: You need to be in the US or change your locale setting to United States and then it works.