I just got an email from my system with a screen shot of a message she just got on Facebook. The message stated:
Worried about search engines? Your information is safe.
There have been misleading rumors recently about Facebook indexing all your information on Google. That is not true. Facebook created public search listings in 2007 to enable people to search for your name and see a link to your Facebook profile. They will still only see a basic set of information.
Facebook Search Engine Privacy Message
NOT a rumor…
What Facebook is calling a rumor is documented by hundreds of posts around the web. About 2 weeks ago, Facebook’s “new and improved” privacy settings were announced. When you click next you get a screen to update your privacy settings (see image below). Many of the defaults on this page are to open your profile information to “everyone“, which includes search engines – and Google.
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.
LinkedIn seems like the middle child of social networking, and is a hugely underrated site. The fact that it’s a “zero cost” business networking tool should definitely play to its advantage and it will surely hit its prime in the future. Like everybody else, the only reason I got to join LinkedIn is because I kept on getting invitations to it until I gave in and gave it a shot. I spent a few hours filling up my profile and adding connections; the whole business only approach was very appealing and a fresh change from the very personal nature of Facebook. Some even argue that it’s not even a social network.
The goal of every business is to be ahead of the curve. To help bring up to speed on how to use LinkedIn effectively, here are several tips and tricks to help you become a LinkedIn power user.
Tip 1. Connect With People You Have Met
Adding connections to your network will definitely make you more visible. Make sure to add people that you meet in real life to your network. It might be a good idea to include a mention of your LinkedIn profile on your business card since it will serve as a reminder to others to add you. Also be sure to send a custom message of invitation to others because reading the same generic message of invitation gets old really quickly.
The Google Leviathan has been on the move lately, engulfing several smaller fish on the internet. The latest “victim” being Gizmo5 a VoIP service a la Skype.
Google Voice, your next phone company
Google Voice
Gizmo5 coupled with Google Voice has the prospect of being a very seductive concoction. Users will sign up to Google Voice and get a phone number that will forward all their calls to all their other numbers. It will also provide them with free conference calling and free voice mail to email services among many others. The service will also offer them ultra-cheap outgoing calls. If Google adds support for SMS and MMS, it will allow the customer to completely circumvent the mobile operators per minute tariff and, in general, it might do to mobile operators what the mobile did to the land line.
Now Google seems to have delinquently tried to steer the regulators away from branding Google Voice as a replacement for landlines, since you will still need a phone number to direct all those calls to. So does that mean Google will be the next AT&T?
Wouldn’t it be just great if you could find the most useful tweets and links about the hottest most interesting topics online, all in one place? Wouldn’t it be just convenient if you could link that valuable information to the tweeple who posted it so you can have continuous access to his/her tweets by following him/her accordingly?
Below you will find our fourth specialized well researched list of 50 Top Twitter Tips and Links divided into 5 distinctive categories: 1) Social Media & Technology, 2) Marketing & Advertising, 3) Design, 4) SEO, 5) Motivational & More.
An interesting white paper published at OneRiot’s blog claims that 40% of users’ search queries across major search engines including Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask are best satisfied by real-time search results. That is, indeed, quite an impressive number that shows the huge potential market for real-time search engines. It also – somehow – explains the huge buzz around Twitter and the continuous talk about the potential threat it poses to other traditional search engines, especially Google.
Real-time search engines fail to gain market share
Aside from Twitter, other – recently emerged – real-time search engines are finding a hard time proving their business model and gaining market share, in spite of the potential huge market. We, here at Thoughtpick, have been monitoring this market since our coverage of 9 real-time search engines a few months ago. Unfortunately, according to compete stats, there has been no major gains in the last 3 months, on the contrary, most services showed a decline in numbers of visitors. In fact, OneRiot which is the most successful in this category, with 150k more visitors than its second competitor Twingly, shows a drop of 100k visitors in the last 3 months.
Oneriot, Twingly, Collecta, Socialmention and Scoopler traffic
The phone rings. It’s your mother: “It’s that time of the year dear, can you help me organize this year’s family reunion? I’ll have my semantic web agent send you the details and I’ll check back with you in half an hour. Take care”
Web 3.0!
That would definitely be labeled as a “nightmare call”, but thankfully mom loves socializing with family members so her agent is connected to their agents… making your life a lot easier. This enables to you check the data that your mom’s semantic web agent has sent over. Other than access to the agent’s contact list of agents, the only other detail that your mother added was “ I want a warm weekend sometime in the next 2 months. ”
So your trusty little agent goes to work and finds appropriate dates based on information from the other agents. He then checks online for hotel bookings in California and Florida – since you have it on your wish list for this year, he puts those results first – and then comes up with 3 package options for each place that would be within budget for you and your family. Then he sends a confirmation email to you and your mom. The phone rings again “Oh hello dear, I just got your email. I like the idea of going to the Keys but I rather pick a different hotel than the ones listed, I heard good things about the Eden hotel from Aunt Jill, Can you check that out please ?”. A couple more clicks, and the trip is planned, hassle-free.
It Could Happen One Day…
That’s one of the scenarios that the next generation of web, Web 3.0, promises us. The ability to allow our computers to not just access, share and preview information but to understand the meaning of information contained in documents and relate it to you, the user.
After almost 2 years of rumors about this deal, Yahoo! made a big move last week when it purchased the Arabic portal Maktoob for an estimated $85 million. This is certainly one of the biggest moves in the Middle East’s tech field, and with it Yahoo! has cemented their policy of focusing on emerging markets, and cashing in on the growth of those markets. After establishing presence in Southeast Asia, India and Latin America, Yahoo! now has a foot hold in one of the biggest untapped markets in the world.
The Arab speaking world is composed of about 320 million speakers, of which about 41 million are Internet users. In addition to that, the region has an impressive adoption rate of over a 1,000%. Previously, both Google and MSN took shy steps by establishing a presence in the UAE and Egypt and creating partnerships with local ISP’s and attempting to educate the market about online advertising, but Yahoo! blew their efforts out of the sand.
The Arab market is ripe for picking and, with this move, Yahoo! has taken the lead in that race and will remain there if they are able to cater to the market’s needs. The reality is that only 1% of Internet content is in Arabic, so there is a void and even hunger for Arabic content on the web. Yahoo! hopes to capitalize on this by their purchase of Maktoob, and extending their current portal by making it relevant to Arabic audience.
![Oneriot.com, Twingly, Collecta, Socialmention and Scoopler traffic [compete.com]](http://blog.thoughtpick.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/oneriot.com+twingly.com+collecta.com+socialmention.com+scoopler.com_uv_460.png)
