The Google Algorithm – Google had made a number of acquisitions over the years which puts them in competition with several other businesses. Does Google favors their own services over others? Well, New York Times thinks so and they are suggesting that Google should be regulated. But Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land brought up some things about NYT and explains why it should be regulated instead.

Exclusive: Apple’s FaceTime coming to iPod touch, iPad – Boy Genius Report has a pretty interesting scope today with some screen shots & details!

Google Announces Second Quarter 2010 Financial Results – “Google had a strong second quarter,” said Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. “Solid growth in our core business and very strong growth in our emerging businesses drove 24% revenue growth year over year.

Apple Is Not Expected to Recall Troubled iPhone – As Apple prepared to address the mounting controversy surrounding the antenna of the iPhone 4, one thing appeared clear: the company does not plan to recall the popular device.

Twitter Continues To Help You Figure Out Who Exactly Is Following You – Twitter’s notification emails that are sent when you have a new follower are getting a much-needed makeover.The new emails have a cleaner interface and now include the follower’s location and bio. This should help users easily detect if a follower is a spammer. This is indeed an excellent addition.

Yahoo Begins Testing Bing Powered Results This Month – Yahoo has confirmed today that they will be testing Bing powered results in the live search results.

WordPress And Thesis Go To Battle. Mullenweg May Sue. – Matt Mullenweg vs Chris Pearson and a never ending debate.

Video: David Letterman’s Top 10 Signs You’ve Purchased A Bad iPhone 4 – You got to watch this

Tweet With Your FACE: Why Big Brands Need Social Brand Ambassadors – Brian Carter writes why sometimes its better for a brand to have a face associated with their social media strategy.

Waging war on Wordpress: Posterous prepares the switch – Looks like posterous is creating a tool everyday so that people can quickly migrate their old data from other platforms to their own. Looks like tomorrow its “Migrate from Wordpress to Posterous” day!

Microsoft Opens Windows 7 SP1 Beta out to Public – Microsoft has released Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 (along with SP1 for Windows Server 2008 R2) for public beta testing. However, please note that the intended audience at the moment is enterprise users, not consumers.

Google Suggest as a Context-Sensitive Spell Checker- Google operating system reported that the Google Suggest that automatically does spell check for you when you miss spell something in your search query is context-sensitive…erm interesting!

Wrapping up World Cup Coverage with Yahoo! Search – World cup pretty much made everyone crazy (even the netizens). Digg deep into what they were searching for during the world cup.

Microsoft Launches Outlook Facebook Integration – Microsoft has integrated Facebook and Windows Live Messenger into Outlook, bringing the newsfeeds of millions of Facebook users into inboxes across the world.

Man Claims Ownership of Facebook – This one is kind of funny, a New York judge has issued a temporary restraining order restricting the transfer of Facebook Inc.’s assets, following a suit by a New York man who claims to own an 84% stake in the social-networking company.

YouTube ‘Partner Grants’ to Offer Money to Video Creators – With hopes of producing more high-quality content, YouTube is ready to provide financial support for some of its amateur auteurs.

It’s Time to Prepare for the End of the Web as We Know It – A great piece by Steve Rubel on Digital Communications

Yahoo Style Guide is Available for order: Is it Web site, website, or web site? What’s the best on-screen placement for a lead story? How can you better know your site’s audience? Why should you? If you want to learn how to write and edit for a global audience
through best practices from Yahoo! then get the Yahoo Style Guide, which is available for order now.

Show Multiple Business Address of a particular area in your Google Adwords Ad: With the makeover of the Adwords Location extensions, you can now show multiple addresses that are relevant to a potential customer’s location.

Google’s Do-It-Yourself App Creation Software – Google is bringing Android software development to the masses by offering a very simple software tool that is intended to make it easy for people to write applications for its Android smartphones.

Google Working On Secret New Ad Format: “Interactive Video Ads”: So finally Google is thinking of a different way to monetize beyond those blue text links.

Google Maps Labs Adds Automatic Short URL For “Link” Feature: If you often link to maps, you are going to appreciate this new lab feature of Google maps that allows you to shorten the Maps “Link” to be a more compact URL.

Android Market Will Hit 100,000 Apps This Month : So you still think android platform doesn’t have apps? Think again…

Would Gaming Fuel A Google Social Network? – Google has recently shown some interest in gaming & social networks (by putting $100 mil in Zynga) and also by ’staying quite’ about the rumors about a new Google social platform “Google Me”.

How Google’s buy of ITA signals where it’s headed in real estate – Google has recently bought one of the biggest airfare search & pricing provider ITA, and now everyone is trying to guess what are they going to do with it. Are they going to integrate it fully in search?

This is a basically Google’s move to put YouTube on your living room and essentially on all television sets & set top boxes that has access to the Internet. However I don’t quite like the way they recommend videos. I know its largely done automatically by the algorithm based on my preference & social graph, however I think Google needs to go one step forward here and find out a way to make these video content really ’suitable’ for the living room. I mean, I may have came across a cat video and “liked” it on YouTube but that doesn’t mean that I am willing to watch cat videos all day on my TV.

How to get Youtube Leanback?

To experience YouTube Leanback yourself, simply go to www.youtube.com/leanback, and you’ll note that a selection of videos — your “feed” — plays immediately. This feed is created based on your YouTube settings and preferences. This includes videos from your subscriptions and stuff that your friends are sharing on Facebook (Provided that you have connected your Facebook account with YouTube). You can also watch the most popular comedy, entertainment, news, or more. And if you don’t care for the video that’s playing, use the right arrow key on your keyboard to skip ahead to the next video, or try the up/down arrows to search, access player controls, and browse channels and videos. The best thing about this interface is that you won’t need your mouse for this experience. Check out the video below to learn more:

But thanks god that Google has finally listened to their users and started supporting Rich Text Signatures out of the box in Gmail. Simply go to your Gmail Settings page and the option will be right there for you. You can now customize your signature by adding pretty formatting, links, and images — or decide to leave things nice and simple.

The feature has also been added to all Google Apps users, so if your company has been using text based signature all this while – It is time for you to move to a more creative version of email signature!

Gmail now also supports a unique signatures for each email address that you have associated with your account. So you can use a different signature for each of the accounts that you use to send out emails from. On the Gmail Settings page, you can edit the signature for each account by changing the email address that appears in the dropdown menu.

[Source: Official Gmail Blog]

Good news for Malaysia! Google DevFest Southeast Asia 2010 is now coming to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on the 16th of July.

DevFest events are a really great opportunity to learn more about Google technologies, new APIs & other developer products. Google DevFest Malaysia 2010 will give you a chance to meet Google developers and engineers in person and ask them any questions that you may have about the Google products. Best of all, DevFest events are free for all developers! However seats at Google DevFest Malaysia 2010 are very limited, so you need to register early.

Google DevFest Malaysia 2010

Date: July 16, 2010 (8:30am – 6:00pm)

Venue: Technology Park Malaysia, Ground Floor, Enterprise 4, Bukit Jalil, 57000 Kuala Lumpur

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Agenda:

- 8:30am – 9:30am – Registration
- 9:30am – 10:00am – Introduction
- 10:00am – 10:45am – Maps
- 10:45am – 11:00am – Break
- 11:00am – 11:45am – Chrome
- 11:45am – 12:00pm – Demos
- 12:00pm – 2:30pm – Lunch & Google Office Hours
- 2:30pm – 3:30pm – Social
- 3:30pm – 4:30pm – Apps
- 4:30pm – 6:00pm – Hackathon

Topics Covered: This year the primary topics of interest are – Chrome/HTML5, Google App Engine, Social APIs, Maps API and more.

For more info about the event & registration, visit the official page.

So are you going to Google DevFest Malaysia 2010?

The user interface of this widget is pretty simple and fits nicely on the size of your phone screen. You can interact with the widget by not only typing (via the touch screen) but also using your own voice. (Yes, it supports voice input, but I believe this is a feature of the phone/android OS itself). But regardless of how you enter the query, Y! search suggestions will help you to find what you’re looking for. The new Yahoo! Mobile search results also shows different shortcuts, news and deeper results only a tap away. For instance if you search for “world cup” it gives a concise set of the latest scores and news, with deeper results about the games, the players the stats and so on.

Yahoo Search Widget for Android

To get Yahoo! search widget on your android phone, firstly download the app from the Android Market and then touch and hold your homescreen. A list will popup, select Yahoo Search from the widget menu — and viola; it’s going to be on your home screen!

Yahoo Mail & Messenger for Android

Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger is also available on all Android devices now as standalone applications, but are also integrated to provide an optimal Yahoo! communications experience. Both the apps comes with features like rich text formatting, Yahoo! emoticons, and access to the Yahoo! Address Book, in apps that are designed from the ground up for the Android platform.

Features Yahoo! Mail App for Android:

- Push notification of new email messages
- Availability of Yahoo! Address Book as well as contacts in the native phone address book
- Good Search Feature. You can search email messages by sender, recipient, subject and keywords in the body of the email
- You can upload photos as attachments directly from camera or your android’s photo gallery
- You can toggle between the Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger apps with ease

Get Yahoo! Mail App for Andorid here.

Features of Yahoo! Messenger App for Android:

- Easy Contact management. Check friends’ status updates & availability as well as update their own status & availability
- Send instant messages to friends via SMS text messages
- Y! Messenger can run in the background with full multitasking support
- Full use of emoticons and rich text formatting
- Send photos to friends directly from the phone’s camera or the photo gallery

Get Yahoo! Messenger for Android here.

You can try out the Yahoo! Search widget and other available yahoo widgets by scanning the barcode below with your Android phone.

However with the new Yahoo Search assist the suggestions that you will get are likely to be ‘real-time’ and a bit ‘time aware’ says Linda Wang, Senior Product Manager of Yahoo Search. So if you want to find out who will Netherlands play next in the world cup, you can search – “Netherlands vs” and Yahoo search assist will automatically show you suggestion based on real-time results.

This feature also works in the Yahoo News search, thus when you are searching for a news story you will get real time news search suggestions based on the keywords that you enter in the search box.

For some reason, I couldn’t really test out this feature as its not working at my end. This might be one of those “US only” additions. I personally think that this feature would be excellent for mobile devices.

Today Facebook has announced a new feature that will make photo tagging inside Facebook dead simple by automatically detecting the faces in the pictures you have and giving you the option to just type then name of the person and hit enter to ‘tag’.

Now that’s pretty neat! Because sometimes group pictures have like 20 different faces, and clicking on each of those faces and tagging them is often a real pain. However when I first read the news, I thought it would actually do a real face detection or face matching and find out all the other photos that has the same person’s face and tag them automatically. Google’s Picasa has already this face-matching feature that lets you organize photos by face.

But users of Facebook won’t like the idea of being “auto-tagged” by a bot, but I believe the Face detection feature that facebook is implementing can just go one step further – Detect the face & then suggest the the name(s) of the likely person (if I have already tagged the same face before in facebook). So this totally eliminates me from having to type that persons name which will save even more time. The “auto-tagging” option can be an optional thing that facebook can just throw in there for advanced users. But unless the algorithm is really good this might be a disaster – So you better don’t try it Facebook! Lets keep things simple for now.

How does this help Facebook? Simple – It provides more traction on the site for new users. When a user joins Facebook for the first time, he is likely to have very limited friends/connections. But in order to really understand the value of Facebook or in other words ‘get addicted to it’, users need to start building all these connections. So Facebook is sort of helping you to build these connections, not by showing up random people to “Add as a friend” but more in the line of showing you public figures, celebrities, brands that you may like. Once you tell Facebook what your interests are, respective updates will start showing up in your News feed.

Currently some of the suggested interests are: Barack Obama, Lady Gaga, Shane Dawson, Xbox, Skittles, Monster Energy, Dr Pepper, World Cup, Eminem, Justin Bieber, Toy Story, Futurama, Playstation, The Office and many more! These suggested interests are basically the old Facebook Fan pages that was later changed to just “Facebook Pages” and the action of becoming a fan was changed to “Like”. Many brands & celebrities are putting a feed of their facebook page as a widget on their own websites where the visitors can interact as well.

Other than pure usability, Facebook will also get a lot of benefit from this implementation in terms of Advertising (thus $$$). If all new users starts telling Facebook from Day 1 that they like Starbucks coffee, domino’s pizza & lady gaga – it gives Facebook a lot of new ad inventory for more targeted advertising which they can later sell to their advertisers.

It is also possible that Facebook will have deals with certain brands to show them as a suggested ‘interest’. Facebook however says: “The list of Pages is strictly determined by an algorithm, so none of the suggestions is sponsored and Page administrators can’t pay or ask to be included.”