Searchyogi

With the Google-Twitter search deal done, we are now seeing the Tweets show up in the Google search results. Pretty awesome. Is twitter going to trump Wikipedia in the search results? It will be interesting to see how tweets will change the tone and quality of the search results.

Google Maps Has lined up pretty good partnerships in the Geolocation ecosystem . It syncs with several GPS models like Garmin, Telenav and Tom Tom. Read more »

This is big news – Murdoch is making noises about preventing Google from crawling News corp sites. Jason Calacanis seems to have smelled this strategy ahead of time. Some interesting stuff going on here (http://bit.ly/2nOzNo). This could mean good news for Bing and an inflection point for Google’s domination in search. Content sites may be able to play search engines off of each other. At least the big ones.

Mike must be pretty happy with the interest his article is generating about RSS being dead, now that Dick Costolo, founder of Feedburner is joining Twitter. This viewpoint seems to be a bit far fetched, at least for the time being. As several TC readers mention in the comments, RSS is quite strongly embedded in most consumer sites, including Twitter itself (I must admit using an RSS reader to look at your twitter stream seems self-defeating). Of course, there is a long history of newer technologies replacing older ones but I believe RSS continues to serve an useful function in terms of bringing specific content to users. Serves as an information filter, if used right and companies like Feedly and onespot are doing a great job of both being an information filter as well as affinity based recommendation engines. Without these kind of tools, it would be easy to feel overwhelmed in no time.

I use Google Trends for understanding the popularity of a wide variety of phenomena. For example, it’s a good tool for getting a rough idea of relative market size. An useful tool. So its not surprising that Google has harnessed all that search query data and understand the data correlation with US economic indices. Google has now launched Google domestic trends that makes it possible for Google Finance users to use this data in making financial/economic predictions around company and US country data (See Techcrunch’s coverage on the topic here).This is one of the more interesting finance/economics projects to come out of Google since Hal Varian (former professor of Economics at Berkeley) joined them.

Now that this data is available in an indexed format to investors at Google Finance, it would be interesting to see if this kind of data will become integral part of the prediction models used by Industry analysts.

I just received email invites for the SF mobile meet-up and the Facebook tech talk. The RSVP policy for both had something that I have not seen before in such emails: Security is tight and if you are not on the RSVP list, you cannot get in. I have a feeling this heightened security is in response to the attacks seen in Mumbai. Here are the email extracts:

SF mobile

Facebook tech talk

NOTE: +1’s are allowed but due to the limited space you must comment with the name of your +1 so that we can add them to the guest list. For security reasons, if you do not RSVP or send us the name of your +1, you or your guest will not be able to attend the event.

Check out the extract from this article about urban poultry farming. One of the sites catering to folks interested in this topic is generating 6 million PVs/month. That’s probably a million plus uniques/month!

Chicken farmers are finding each other on sites like TheCityChicken.com, UrbanChickens.org and MadCityChickens.com. BackyardChickens.com logs some 6 million page views each month and has some 18,000 members in its forum, where community members share colorful stories (giving a chicken CPR), photos (from a California chicken show), even look to each other for comfort. “I am worried that non-BYC people won’t understand why a 34-year-old woman would cry over a $7 chicken,” writes a Stockton, N.J., woman, whose chicken was killed by a hawk.

Sometimes a movie or book touches you deeply. Here is a movie based on an immigrant theme that really struck a cord with me.

The Visitor

I saw this movie recently on a plane trip to India. Haaz Sleiman’s acting as Tarek, an illegal immigrant from Syria, is wonderful. He gives the character a very energetic and high-pitched feel.

In case you want to see the movie, here is a link to the DVD on Amazon.

I am glad there are companies out there (finally) that are tackling the question of toxicity in products and whether the companies that are producing products have sustainable practices. The whole question of being green is gaining momentum (apart from the marketing spin) and society is all the better for it. Check out goodguide.com. They offer reviews on products from a green standpoint. I found the snippet on their “about us” page about sunscreen very telling. This is exactly how I have always felt about this stuff. It is very disconcerting to see people using chemicals without the slightest hesitation or popping aspirin at the slightest headache just because the FDA or some other government agency has approved the product.

Here is the snippet:

One summer a few years ago, Dara O’Rourke was doing what he’d done dozens of times before: putting sunscreen on his five-year old daughter Minju before she went outside to play in the summer sun. The thought occurred to Dara, “I wonder what’s really in this stuff?” So being a Professor at the University of California-Berkeley, Dara researched the sunscreen. What he found was surprising and disturbing: the sunscreen he’d been putting on Minju for years had a toxic ingredient.

Go Sustainable!

US unemployment rate reaches 14 year high