Just how big a threat is the real-time web to Google? As Om has pointed out, real-time content marks a still-amorphous but important new phase of evolution in the web, allowing for the instantaneous discovery of newly added information. And Twitter and Facebook are emerging as an alternative to the traditional engine, which presents a big challenge to Google’s core business. As Larry Page admitted this week, the company finally gets that. Continue »

Twitter might be Oprah’s new tech love, but it goes without saying — she loves Skype, the Internet calling service that makes an appearance on her show pretty much every day. She is going to reaffirm her love for Skype on Thursday, May 21, 2009, in an episode called “Where the Skype Are You?”. The show will have videos from different locations around the world. And later, Skype President Josh Silverman will be making an appearance on the show to talk to Oprah about Skype and how to use it.

Every few years, the Internet — and, by extension, the web — gets bigger and better. As publishing tools get better, we share more content online. As we publish more content, more services emerge to help us find and consume that content. In the early days of the commercial web, it was magazine-like entities such as Hot Wired. Then came search-engine directories and portals such as Lycos and Yahoo.

Towards the end of the last century, digital content started to grow exponentially, and with that, arose the need for a super-search engine like Google. Larry Page and Sergey Brin helped changed user behavior by making it easy to seek, search and consume any content. They spent billions on their infrastructure and made search better, faster and easier — so easy that, like a drug, we got hooked on Google’s search. (Related: Google at 10: Larry, Sergey & me.)

And now we are seeing yet another subtle change in people’s behavior and how content is discovered online. Continue »

This morning, Google somehow rerouted some of its vast hordes of web traffic through Asia, causing service delays, interruptions, and a bit of craziness on Twitter. But it also managed to slow down a few retail web sites, and cause a noticeable gap in the worldwide web traffic. Check out the charts below.

Arbor Networks, which provides telecommunications gear and network security information, noted on its blog that Google comprises up to 5 percent of the web’s traffic, and when that traffic disappeared earlier this morning, it created an obvious lull.

Continue »

Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience and Associate Project Manager Nundu Janakiram

Google today unveiled a host of new tweaks to its search functionality, among them filters and visualization, spell-checking and preview tools that improve both the relevance and accuracy of results. But while it still isn’t offering a way to get real-time search results from across the web, it is getting closer.

The company’s push toward real-time search is emblematic of both the field’s increasing relevance, and of Google’s pattern of improving on ideas explored by innovative startups. Google’s shrewdly organized results, broad infrastructure, and creative user interface design give it an edge on emerging point solutions for real-time search, even if it doesn’t capture every bit of new content the instant it appears on the web. Continue »

Today we got one of several surveys designed to strike fear into the hearts of corporate IT managers, noting that socially oriented Web 2.0 sites are now a premier target for hackers. The report, from The Secure Enterprise 2.0 Forum, says sites such as blogs, wikis and social media sites were hacked in 21 percent of the cases reported in the first quarter.

The study, which noted that Web 2.0 is a new category, detailed the hijacking of the MacRumors Twitter account to falsely trumpet that Steve Jobs had died, as well as several celebrity email and twitter account hacks. It’s scary stuff, but while social media may be a growing target for hackers, the biggest danger to a company still comes from the damage a few stupid employees can create while using the sites. Continue »

This past weekend, while walking around San Francisco’s Union Square shopping area, I decided to stop by at one of my favorite stores — Thomas Pink — to see if they had any exciting new shirts worth buying. While shopping options remained tame, I did get into a discussion with one of the salespeople, who in our chitchat picked up on the fact that I’m a technology writer.

“So what is this Twitter all about?” he asked me. I was taken aback by such a question in a decidedly non-tech and retail setting, but then quickly realized that Twitter perhaps is one of the most commonly used words in the media today. Everyone from Oprah to blathering potato-heads on cable television channels are touting their Twitter accounts, and that interest has started to spill over into the mainstream. This is making an already hot service by a San Francisco-based startup even hotter. Twitter added 5 million new users in March 2009, according to ComScore Media Metrix, a market research firm. Nielsen says nearly 60 percent of new Twitter users bail on the service as they try to figure it out.

In the past, I have pointed out that Twitter is many things to many people. The many definitions of Twitter are what actually make it very powerful. (Dave Winer, on the other hand, believes that soon there will be “many different Twitters” for precisely those reasons.)

Take my Thomas Pink salesperson. After some basic questions about Twitter, he leaped to the money question: How he could boost his sales at the store via Twitter? Now Twitter as a channel for e-commerce is something I don’t actively think about, but his question did make me think: A salesperson could create a list of followers to whom he or she can broadcast messages such as “your favorite striped shirts are available at 30 percent off” — or something like that.

Regardless of how Twitter mutates, this weekend shopping trip turned out to be yet another proof-point that Twitter might be hitting a tipping point.