Quirky News of the Web — Feb 2010

While news like the new Google Buzz, the new Facebook interface and soon to come mailing system dominate the headlines, there are always smaller headlines that tend to go unnoticed. They are the headlines that let us know how individualistic and unique some of the interactions on the web can be, and how much social media is shaping our world in ways that we could not have fathomed 20 years ago.

So the Quirky News of the Web section will be dedicated to those pieces of news that might go unnoticed but still pack quite the punch.

Google only looks out for Google’s privacy

After a wild party hosted by Orkut Büyükkökten, a senior Google engineer, Google exec barred the pictures of the night from being posted on the web. The home-warming party was wild, with  female and male strippers, booze and God knows what else; so there was a good reason for the ban. Thankfully, we can always depend on Facebook for leaks when Google fails, photos of the party surfaced on it.

Orkut at a party in Jan. 2009

Orkut at a party in Jan. 2009

Google Dashboard: Google’s Answer To Privacy Concerns?

Google has consistently tried to battle privacy concerns regarding their tools and services. Users naturally are always skeptical about how the information that Google stores about them is being used. We, at Thoughtpick, raised the issue of privacy concerns that users have and most recently tackled this issue in the article discussing Google’s acquisition of Gizmo5.

To counteract this seasonal hailstorm of concerns, this time, Google has introduced the Google Dashboard. The Dashboard will include all the information they have about your Google accounts and offer one central location for you to manage the settings of all your Google services and accounts.

So does the dashboard deliver?

I was actually really looking forward to the Dashboard and interested in the features they will include in it: What kind of dirty little secrets does Google know about me? So when it was open for use, I excitedly went to google.com/dashboard and entered my account information to log into it and discover the much outed and unprecedented privacy central that Google is giving to me.

Google wants to Speed up the Web! Is your site optimized? [video]

Google is re-writing their search rank algorithm to include load time as a factor. They hope that this move will improve users’ experience of the web at large.

Share a post

Got an amazing campaign, web app or a social media related topic that you'd like to share with our readers?

Try Our #FF Helper App

FollowFriday Helper makes playing Twitter's #ff a piece of cake!

A brand new way to recommend tweeps based on how you tweet...

We love Tweepi

Tweepi Logo

Follow the best and unfollow the bots, with the only Twitter management tool with stats!

Explore Thoughtpick

Our Archived Posts

We're on Twitter

Like us on Facebook

Thoughtpick by email

For more Learn Social Media by Example reviews, don't forget to subscribe to our posts by email:

©2010 thoughtpick, copyrights reserved.