Phil Bradley's weblog

Wherevent

Upcoming events in your area Does exactly what it says really. You can search by event name, or by date. There's also an option to search on location, but it's still rather too new to have many smaller locations available. From the look of it, most if not all of the data is culled from Facebook. Each event has its own page, with a map, date, times, description and the people who are attending - or at least their avatars from Facebook. Looks fine, but it's going to need a lot more events to make it valuable.

The Science Fiction Gateway

The Science Fiction Gateway

Containing works by the classic SF pulp writers of the Golden Age right through to modern award-winning authors, the SF Gateway is the largest library of digital Science Fiction and Fantasy ever assembled. With news, opinions, community features and forums, and links to the ultimate SF authority, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, the site should quickly become the natural home on the net for anyone with an interest in classic SFF. Just 64 days until lift off!

FindHow

The How-To Search Engine From the website: "Today, consumers can instead find a dizzying variety of instructions for many everyday tasks on the Internet, at a myriad of useful sites. Unfortunately, many site owners create massive amounts of relatively poor-quality How-To content, in the hope that it will be automatically indexed by the major search engines. As a result, consumers must increasingly wade through vast numbers of irrelevant search results and content of questionable quality in order to find How-Tos they can trust to succeed in their objectives.

FindHow, the How-To search engine, brings trust back into the equation by focusing on indexing only high-quality How-To's, typically from well-known, recognized brand names or individuals. Many of these sources (often companies, government entities, or educational institutions) have other motives for providing information besides pure profits, and most have trusted, off-line brand name reputations to protect - which encourages them to focus on providing trustworthy and high-quality information"

The site tends towards the practical - there is a lot on it at the moment about preparing for summer. A concern is that it's very heavily biased towards the United States, which may well mean that some of the 'how to's' are not going to be so appropriate for the rest of the world. However, it's an interesting concept and if you're stuck and unsure how to land an F16 if the engine has flamed out on you, this is a site that you must visit!

hashtagify.me

Explore the hashtagspace This is a nice little search feature for hashtags on Twitter. Simply pop in your preferred hashtag to search on, and it will display a 'wonder wheel' of related tags, links to most recent tweets using the tag and a graph of top influencers of that particular tag. It looks nice and neat and does the job well. The top influencers graph looks very interesting, and would be a great way to find good people to follow in a particular area. I'd like to see an integration with ones own Twitter account, but this is a great start.

 

Related articles

• Hashtagify: Exploring the Connections between Twitter Hashtags (infosthetics.com)

People Search

PPLDIG Another people search engine. This works as well as all of the others, which is to say, not very well at all. I tried a quick search for me, and specified my name and my location as London UK. Not entirely sure therefore why the first result came up for someone in Washington DC, but there you go. It did actually find me - or at least my Flickr stream, so I should give it points for that.

As well as Flickr, this thing covers Facebook, MySpace, and perhaps other social media sites, but this wasn't self evident. There's a section for images, videos (although it didn't find my YouTube ones), documents, web pages and that was about it. Unfortunately, I couldn't phrase search, which when you're dealing with names is pretty damn necessary, so I was also getting a lot of false hits, which is why this didn't really impress me.

Shakeups continue at Google

If Big G wasn't getting enough coverage over Googleplus, they're certainly ensuring that the number of blog posts about them has rocketed over the last few days with a number of interesting closures.

First of all, the Google Labs project is closing, according to the official Google blog. I think it's a real shame, because I always enjoyed looking at the different ideas that Google had and trying them out. What this indicates to me is that Google is becoming less innovative and more focussed on the upcoming Google/Facebook war. I wonder how long it will be before the idea of 20% time also disappears as well. I wonder if we'll get any kind of notification about the ending of different experiments, or they'll just entirely stop from one minute to the next without an official announcement. Truth be told, I'm not really that surprised, as Google can be pretty ruthless about closing things down with very little notice. Does anyone still remember Google Librarian Central, which just went offline? Interestingly, the blog is still up, and full of comment spam! We were promised that this would be replaced by a Google Librarian Newsletter, and that folded after a couple of issues.

Next to place its head on the chopping block is the Google Directory. In truth, it was never really theirs, as they got the data from the Open Directory Project which is still running. The days of the big directories are now really all over, give that the ODP 'About' page was last updated in 2002. However, if you still hanker after such an approach, Yahoo Directory is the last holdout in this area really. Again, I'm not surprised that this has gone - there's a huge amount of people hours that needs to go into making one of these things work properly, and very few people actually use them for search now. And given that there are already plenty of clustering search engines out there, one does have to wonder as to their value.

And the latest casualty is the Google Toolbar for Firefox. Google's attitude is that a lot of the functionality of the toolbar is now built directly into the browser - so it's another push towards getting us all weaned off Firefox and IE and onto Chrome. Firefox is currently pushing people to upgrade to version 5, and it's this version that doesn't support the toolbar. However, if you still really like using it, there are alternatives. There is an add-on compatibility widget that provides access to most of the functionality or you can install the Google toolbar Lite addon which is what I use instead. I really do think that this is something of an error on Google's part since it's not difficult to update, and provides immediate access to the search engine. However - if you view what Google is doing in the light of Googleplus, this does make sense, since you can search directly from G+ and so it's fairly clear to me that what the company is doing is pushing users towards both their browser and their environment.

These recent changes are all quite aggressive, and I just get the feeling that Google is battening down the hatches, getting rid of the deadwood and preparing for a really big fight.

Google alerts users to malware

Interesting post from the Official Google blog site. They've noticed that a number of computers that connect to search are showing strange behaviour and they have worked out that some machines have been infected with specific types of malware. Consequently, if they identify a computer that's exhibiting this behaviour they're putting a message up on their screen 'Your computer appears to be infected'.

All that you need to do to check is to go to the Google site (I assume .com) and type in a search (any search) and look at the results. If you see a dirty great big yellow banner at the top of the screen, you're one of the infected. There's a link on how to fix it as well.

So what is Google+ all about then?

I've seen lots of blog posts and articles and discussions on what G+ is about, and how it is a this killer or that killer. If I had a penny for each of them I'd be quite rich. Does that stop me writing my own? Of course it doesn't.

G+ isn't an anything killer. Sure, I imagine that Google would love it if Twitter got whumped, or Facebook fell off the face of the earth as we all flocked like dutiful sheep across to G+, but it's not happening anytime soon. And, as per my previous blog post, Microsoft is going to be wading into the mire in the not too distant future with their offering. G+ isn't (and this is of course all just my own opinion) bothered about them. Google is doing what Google always does, and that's to go after the money.

The problem that Google has always had is that its main method of making money - search - is at absolute odds with the end goal. Google wants to serve us lots of adverts and get us to click on them. It has to provide a vaguely decent search engine in order to do this, but if the search engine does what it should do, we click on a good site and we're off. We've left Google and their adverts behind. Google doesn't make money out of being a good search engine, it makes money out of being good at serving us with appropriate adverts that match our search. If Google is constantly fighting itself, Facebook is doing the exact opposite, because it's bringing the advertisers to the users. What Google should, and I suspect is worried about isn't the number of users of Facebook per se, it's the fact that companies are now creating their own Facebook sites and are encouraging users to go directly to those, instead of doing a search for the company at Google and clicking on the advert, thus making Big G a pile of cash.

Google has a bunch of different and interesting products - some of which directly provide you with adverts, such as Gmail, and others that don't, but even in that case, they're all part of the Google family. The problem up until now is that they're all separate and individual. I can use Gmail without using Search, and I can certainly use Firefox or IE without a consideration for Chrome at all. Consequently the thing that I find most interesting with G+ is this:

and at the other end of the screen, this:

Wherever I go in the Google world I'm now seeing this. It's a constant reminder to click on that little red notification box to see what's going on. With Facebook, it's either an email (which guess what, I get via Gmail) or I have to open the tab and take a look. As long as I'm anywhere in Google, I'm now being kept informed. As another point - and I admit that I might be taking paranoia to new heights here, is that I find that I get a much better feel for G+ when I'm in Chrome. Notifications are faster, smoother and more effective. In Firefox and IE it does seem to lag slightly. Consequently I'm now tending to have Chome open in my second monitor with G+ open on the screen all of the time.

G+ is going to be adding new functionality in the coming weeks, and I'm guessing that just about every single major change that they make is going to be to embrace more of their resources. I'm expecting to see the ability to import GoogleDocs for example. GoogleReader isn't far behind, and that may well bolster up the weakness that is the Sparks option. If G+ can add in my RSS feeds that's going to be a huge thing for me. iGoogle is going to be coming along sooner or later as well.

Do libraries/librarians really need to know this stuff?

In my opinion, it's absolutely vital that they do. Libraries will need to create their own profiles and presence on G+ in exactly the same way that some of them having been doing on Facebook. I'd like to see librarians getting a good grip on G+ so that they can explain it to library users. I think it would be really cool to see some posters above workstations that go through the basics AND offer invites to users as well.

As an aside, you'll doubtless get people whining on about how you've already wasted time on Facebook, and now you want to do the same thing on G+ and can't you just get it right first time and various other blah blah blah and meh comments. The constant here is that you need to go to where the conversations are. You weren't wrong, and are not wrong in having a presence on Facebook. But equally, you need to be anywhere online that it's important to be, and right now, that's including G+. Besides, a key role for the information professional is to inform and assist users, and if they want to know about G+ - and they will, we need to know enough in advance to help them.

Librarians need to start using the +1 option both in G+ and more generally. If you have people who are using G+ - and certainly if the library/librarian has invited them, they'll see the kind of thing that their librarian thinks is important. That in turn flags up the value of what the librarians are doing. The more that we can do in the area of +1'ing and Liking stuff (not forgetting Facebook of course) the more we're constantly bringing ourselves to the attention of our user groups. The more of this we can do, which in the medium term will also affect search results, preferably for the better for our users, the more they can see the value we can bring to them and their communities.

One last thing, which is an interesting graph. At the moment G+ 'only' has about 10,000,000 users. Small fry in comparison to Twitter and Facebook. But they've been around a while. Let's take a look at a graph that shows something different - how long it took to reach 10 mil users:

That's why librarians need to know about G+, and that's why it's important.

Microsoft to enter social media fray

Just when you thought that you couldn't take any more social media hysteria, along comes Microsoft to pile on the pressure. Now, before you curl up in the corner of the room in a little ball sobbing, while it's more than a rumour it's a long way from completion. Which is pretty much what you'd expect really - the bigger the giant, the harder it is for them to actually do anything. However, Microsoft 'by accident' allowed brief access to a website which has now been withdrawn, with the code name at this stage of Tulalip. Here's a screenshot:

It's very... green. There's a bit more news over at News in a box, but that's pretty much it for the time being.

Twazzup

Realtime News This is a *nice* social media search engine. It provides you with a whole bunch of stuff. Highlights, News, Twitter tweets, Top Links, Community (broken into influencers, most active and latest) and word clouds.

It's very smooth, clear, has a nice use of columns and is quite like SocialMention, so if you like one, you'll like the other. Give it a try and tell me what you think.