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Google gets real-time, but is real actually good?
In yesterday’s massive Google product roll-out, the big drawcard was the release of real-time search into their standard search results. Real-time search initially includes Twitter tweets, but will soon include Facebook status updates (from public profiles) and MySpace statuses, too. As The Guardian quite rightly notes, the release of real-time search quashes talk about Twitter or Facebook becoming major challengers to Google’s search dominance:
Some critics have posited that websites like Facebook and Twitter could eventually rival Google, thanks to their ability to tap into millions of public messages being sent constantly between individuals. That threat comes in addition to more traditional search engines like Microsoft‘s Bing.com have threatened to forge exclusive deals with some content providers as a way to claw back market share. Instead, Google has acted to bring those services into the fold, though it would neither confirm nor deny whether there was a financial relationship behinds its links with social networking sites.
Indeed, in the New York Times, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone suggests that the relationship between Twitter and Google is an ideal partnership, with Google’s advanced search technologies making Twitter searching more meaningful to users:
Twitter makes a search tool available on its own site. But Biz Stone, a Twitter co-founder, said that Google would be better able to serve up Tweets that are relevant to a particular user’s questions. “Were not good at relevancy right now, and they are,” he said. “More people will get more value out of Twitter because we are doing this with Google.”
Real-time search will appear in a live-updating box at the top of relevant search results; here’s Google’s real-time search video to explain:
Real-time search is being rolled out across the globe in the coming days, but to see it in action now, head over to Google Trends and click on any of the popular searches; the results will include real-time search results.
Of course, it’s worth mentioning that just because social media statuses and tweets are being generated in ‘real-time’ it doesn’t necessarily make them worth reading. On any given topic, the speed with which Twitter fills up with spam tweets is pretty rapid, so this is a whole new spam arena, with the real prize being the top spots on Google’s most valuable real-estate: the main search pages. More to the point, while other results are ranked in various ways, real-time just means it’s happening now, which is no indication of quality whatsoever. Real-time is a whole new game in some ways, and it’ll be interesting to see what happens. Naturally, for people who still haven’t thought through their privacy in terms of Twitter or Facebook should really think about it now; do you want your status updates appearing at the top of Google’s search results? A question especially important when Google’s CEO is happy to state on the record: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
Oh, and in another Google product launch which got a lot less attention, Google’s mobile phone OS, android, now has a really promising image recognition app: Google Goggles; just take a picture and let Google Goggles figure out what it is, and take you to an appropriate reference! Goggles don’t do facial recognition, yet, but there’s a future worth thinking through, too!
Digital Culture Links: December 2nd 2009
Links for November 27th 2009 through December 2nd 2009:
- Seven’s FlashForward “leaked” to US [TV Tonight] – “Monday night’s episode of FlashForward was the last for the year on Seven, and screened before the US which took a broadcast break for Thanksgiving. That resulted in the episode being uploaded as a torrent and now “leaked” to America. The Hollywood Reporter notes that “Australians don’t care about our guilt-tinged empire-expanding holiday traditions and didn’t take a break. Whether the US-Aussie FlashForward schedule being jolted out-of-sync will result in future episodes also being leaked isn’t known.” Presumably the episode will be downloaded across the US complete with a Channel 7 watermark. It’s all rather ironic given Disney / ABC went to great lengths to make sure Aussie media didn’t reveal information on the series in the lead-up to the premiere, insisting they attend a cinema screening and sign confidentiality clauses.” (US viewers, welcome to the other side of the tyranny of digital distance!)
- The hits on iView [TV Tonight] – “Four Corners, United States of Tara, Good Game, Doctor Who, The Chaser’s War on Everything and Media Watch are the most popular titles on the ABC’s iView platform. The online catch-up service has been operating since July 2008. Since April this year there have been 6.2 million views of programs with an annual monthly average of 610,000 visits, up by 140% compared to last year. It averages 206,000 visitors per month, up by 60% compared to last year. In October 2009, ABC iView recorded its highest ever number of visitors and visits. 286,000 visitors and 1.054 million visits to ABC iView.” (Finally, streaming timeshifted TV is making solid inroads in Australia.)
- Moviegoers 2010 available for download [Marketing Strategy for Entertainment and Brand Clients – Stradella Road] – “Why does movie studio tracking and research so often surprise and disappoint us? The answer experienced movie marketers gave us in private conversations was this: We still don’t know our customers/audience as well as we should.
Where do moviegoers really spend their time? What are the social dynamics of the decision-making process? How do we synthesize the sea changes taking place with digital technologies in order to reach the right audience with the right message at the right time in the right place? We designed the Moviegoers 2010 research study to answer these questions […]
• Moviegoers spend more time each week online (19.8 hours) than they do watching TV (14.3 hours)
• 52% of moviegoers have digital video recorders (61% of the 30-39 demo) and, of those consumers, 71% fast-forward to skip commercials.
[Download the full report – PDF] - Westfield Facebook application draws fire [mUmBRELLA] – Westfield has drawn criticism over a Facebook application that may be in breach of the social networking site’s terms and conditions, despite the two companies collaborating to develop it. The application updates a user’s status with a Westfield-branded message to promote its Gift Card. It requires the user to opt in so that their status is updated to “All I Want for Christmas is a Westfield Gift Card”, with extra copy stating that the user has now gone into the draw to win a $10,000 gift card. […] But the promotion has also attracted a backlash from other users, complaining that the promotion is taking over the social networking site as friends’ status updates that feature the Westfield branding, clutter their screens. Facebook groups have also been created in opposition to it. One group, known as If All You Want For Christmas Is A Westfield Gift Card, I Don’t Want To Know, currently has over 3,300 fans.” (Spam as a Facebook App … great marketing!)
Digital Culture Links: November 23rd 2009
Links for November 17th 2009 through November 23rd 2009:
- Microsoft and News Corp eye web pact [FT.com] – “Microsoft has had discussions with News Corp over a plan that would involve the media company’s being paid to “de-index” its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry. The impetus for the discussions came from News Corp, owner of newspapers ranging from the Wall Street Journal of the US to The Sun of the UK, said a person familiar with the situation, who warned that talks were at an early stage. However, the Financial Times has learnt that Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers to persuade them to remove their sites from Google’s search engine. News Corp and Microsoft, which owns the rival Bing search engine, declined to comment.” (NewsCorp + Microsoft = B(e)ing Evil!) [Via]
- Teachers warned off online Facebook contact with students [PerthNow] – “Teachers[in Western Australia] would be banned from contacting students on social-networking websites like Facebook or Myspace under proposed changes to their code of ethics. The move comes after the WA College of Teaching disciplinary committee reprimanded about 10 teachers in the past year for inappropriate cyber interaction with students. The behaviour included teachers sharing private photos with students and in some cases engaging in online sexual innuendo. WACOT’s disciplinary committee chairwoman, Theresa Howe, said the code of ethics needed to be updated to specifically target inappropriate and over-friendly computer correspondence between students and teachers.”`We’re seeing an increase in it and it has to be specifically addressed,” she said. `That should be in both the code of ethics and in professional development courses for teachers.”
- Reporter Center’s Channel [YouTube] – A fantastic resource to help up and coming reporters, journalists and media students think about how to go about, and improve, the way they do things. [Via mUmbrella]
- BigPond pulls plug on Second Life [The Age] – “Telstra has decided to close its doors on Second Life, evicting the residents of its virtual BigPond Island and revoking their unmetered usage, in a move that has infuriated some subscribers. BigPond’s presence will cease on December 16, signalling an end to its two-year “experiment” with Second Life, and residents of the swanky virtual Pond Estate have been given a month to relocate elsewhere. Second Life is a virtual world that enables members to build or trade in-world objects and interact through their “avatars”. In its early days, new users flocked to the platform and organisations raced to set up a presence there to find new ways of engaging with their public, but the buzz surrounding virtual communities has since waned. According to a Second Life enthusiast, as many as 1600 users could be affected by BigPond’s closure, many of whom are socially isolated or disabled and unable to afford to continue maintaining their presence on the virtual world without unmetered usage.”
Digital Culture Links: November 14th 2009
Links for November 12th 2009 through November 14th 2009:
- Labels may be losing money, but artists are making more than ever [Boing Boing] – Interesting figures that show while music labels might be losing money, artists are making more than ever. Live performances are the key revenue raisers. (The figures don’t break down much further than that, but it’s important since it asks whether artists or just labels are the ones who are really fighting “piracy”.)
- Massively Increasing Music Licensing Fees For Clubs Down Under Massively Backfires [Techdirt] – Time for a few Creative Commons licensed nightclubs to rock Australia: “We’ve noted the ridiculous and self-defeating efforts by many music collections societies around the world to jack up their rates by ridiculous amounts. None was more ridiculous than the attempt in Australia by the PPCA where some of the rate changes would rocket up from figures like $125/year… to $19,344/year. Well, it looks like it’s already backfiring badly. Reader Dan alerts us to the news that the organization that represents night clubs and similar businesses in Australia, appropriately named Clubs Australia, has set up a system whereby the organization will specifically go out and seek music by artists not covered by the collections effort, and distribute that music to clubs and other establishments”
- Moving forward with our media studies search [Just TV] – Jason Mittell is leading the search for a new comparative media studies faculty member at Middlebury College in the US. What’s fantastic is that as the search leader, he’s blogging the process and trying to explain how decisions are made – given the absolute paucity of jobs available today, these insights are remarkably valuable (and do turn an often opque process into a very human one: “But I think a key lesson for candidates to realize is that not making the cut is rarely a referendum of your worth as a scholar or teacher – it’s usually more about a sense of the position and internal needs that are hard to articulate, combined with the inevitable comparisons among the applicant pool.”
- URL shorteners suck less, thanks to the Internet Archive and 301Works [Boing Boing] – Big URL shortening companies like bit.ly are working with the Internet Archive to ensure that if their companies ever go bust, the shortened URLs will always work thanks to a backup via the archive. Nice!
- NASA finds ‘significant’ water on moon [CNN.com] – Wowzers, there’s water on the moon! “NASA said Friday it had discovered water on the moon, opening “a new chapter” that could allow for the development of a lunar space station. The discovery was announced by project scientist Anthony Colaprete at a midday news conference. “I’m here today to tell you that indeed, yes, we found water. And we didn’t find just a little bit; we found a significant amount” — about a dozen, two-gallon bucketfuls, he said, holding up several white plastic containers.
- His Facebook Status Now? ‘Charges Dropped’ [NYTimes.com] – Facebook status updates as an alibi: “Where’s my pancakes, read Rodney Bradford’s Facebook page, in a message typed on Saturday, Oct. 17, at 11:49 a.m., from a computer in his father’s apartment in Harlem. … words that were gobbledygook to anyone besides Mr. Bradford. But when Mr. Bradford, a skinny, short 19-year-old resident of the Farragut Houses, was arrested the next day as a suspect in a robbery, the words took on a level of importance that no one in their wildest dreams — least of all Mr. Bradford — could have imagined. They became his alibi. His defense lawyer, Robert Reuland, told a Brooklyn assistant district attorney, Lindsay Gerdes, about the Facebook entry, which was made at the time of the robbery. The district attorney subpoenaed Facebook to verify that the status update had actually been typed from a computer located at 71 West 118th Street in Harlem, as Mr. Bradford said. When that was confirmed, the charges were dropped.”
Digital Culture Links: November 10th 2009
Links for November 5th 2009 through November 10th 2009:
- Murdoch may block Google searches [BBC NEWS | Business] – Murdoch plans to pull News Corps stories from Google. And apparently he thinks he can do away with fair dealing, too. I fear the old tiger is roaring his last roars: “Rupert Murdoch has said he will try to block Google from using news content from his companies. The billionaire told Sky News Australia he will explore ways to remove stories from Google’s search indexes, including Google News. Mr Murdoch’s News Corp had previously said it would start charging online customers across all its websites. He believes that search engines cannot legally use headlines and paragraphs of news stories as search results. “There’s a doctrine called ‘fair use’, which we believe to be challenged in the courts and would bar it altogether,” Mr Murdoch told the TV channel. “But we’ll take that slowly.””
- Journalists are the audience formerly known as the media [bronwen clune] – Bronwen Clune’s Media 140 talk in which she makes some very sensible noises about journalists on Twitter: “Participatory media doesn’t mean you letting your audience participate in the creation of news, it about acknowledging that you participate in news creation along with your audience. … We’ve heard Jay Rosen’s quote here a few times today about “the people formerly known as the audience.” To which I’d like to add: Journalists are the audience formerly known as the media.”
- Iran, Twitter and the new media world. [Off Air] – Mark Colvin’s thoughtful and detailed look at the Twitter Revolution in Iran, looking at the ethics and practice of getting information via Twitter, some sensible methods for gauging accuracy of tweets, the danger in distorting figures on both sides, and the fact that, at the end of the day, Iran’s Twitter Revolution failed … but there were seeds of hope: “The first victory is that for millions of people around the world, Iranians were not faceless Middle Easterners …You cannot bomb a regime without bombing its people … The second victory is that they saw themselves as we saw them, and they saw us cheering them on. They saw ordinary people in countries like America – which the ayatollahs call The Great Satan – and Britain – The Little Satan – coming out in support of their hopes and fears. For once that couldn’t be censored by State media.”
Digital Culture Links: November 5th 2009
Links for November 3rd 2009 through November 5th 2009:
- The ABC of social media use [ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)] – How bizzare: social media use guidelines in a major corporation which actually make sense! “ABC managing director Mark Scott has announced new social media guidelines, which the national broadcaster’s journalists and staff must abide by. […] In an email sent to ABC staff this morning, the new Use of Social Media policy gives four standards which staff and contractors must follow when using both work and personal social media interaction:
1. Do not mix the professional and the personal in ways likely to bring the ABC into disrepute.
2. Do not undermine your effectiveness at work.
3. Do not imply ABC endorsement of your personal views.
4. Do not disclose confidential information obtained through work.” - The temporary web [BuzzMachine] – Jeff Jarvis articulates some important concerns about the way Twitter and other social services are contributing to a more temporary, less archivable (or, at least, less searchable in the long term) web: “…search is turning social and our search results are becoming personalized, thus we don’t all share the same search results and it becomes tougher to manage them through SEO. Put these factors together – the social stream – and relationships matter more than pages (but then, they always have). “
- Internet piracy [Background Briefing – 1 November 2009] – Australia’s Radio National programme Backgroud Briefing takes a look at copyright in the digital age, featuring the big arguments and comments from everyone from AFACT to Lessig and Girl Talk. Segment by Oscar McLaren.
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