unfriending is the word of the year

Can it be the word of the year if only half of those in the know use it? “Unfriended,” undoubtedly ripped from the lexicon of Facebook users worldwide, is this year’s Word of the Year, at least according to the New Oxford English Dictionary. But not according to me.

I’ve been using Facebook for almost three years now, and in that time I’ve only had to sever friendship ties with two people – someone I didn’t like very much in the first place and a musician who would not stop filling my inbox with invites to concerts. But I’ve never “unfriended” anyone. I “defriended” them, and I’m gonna stick to “defriending” no matter what the New Oxford English Dictionary has to say about it.

When you really think about it though, isn’t “unfriending” kind of a morbid pick for Word of the Year? Or isn’t it at least a little strange? Are that many social network users really cutting ties with friends that this has become the word of the year?

Sure, it was one thing to go with “podcasting” in 2005, but “podcasting” was all the rage back then. Can the same be said about “unfriending?” I can’t imagine that to be the case.

Either way, I’m standing firm in my commitment to “defriended” over “unfriended.” Rolls off the tongue much better my way.

See the other words up for the honorable distinction of being this year’s New Oxford English Dictionary word of the year. We wish they’d gone with “funemployed,” but what are you gonna do?

This season two Twitter memes, Sh*t My Dad Says and Texts from Last Night, have been picked up by broadcasting networks to be aired as half-hour mainstream television series. While the creators of these memes are likely overjoyed with the amount of money they have the potential to make, how excited is the rest of the Internet?

Many people who post material on the Internet may want it to stay on the Internet. Justin Halpern, the creator of Sh*t My Dad Says, however, is probably completely comfortable with his content being presented to a mainstream audience. It brings more attention, as there are demographics who don’t use the Internet often but watch network television.

In the case of these two memes, the journey to television will necessitate some changes to the content. Sh*t My Dad Says will elaborate on the character of the obnoxious but hilarious father seen in many sitcoms by making him the focal point. Many of his quotes are quite vulgar, however, and can’t possibly be taken to TV verbatim. Texts from Last Night, too, is often vulgar, as well as revealing the many unscrupulous activities of its anonymous contributors. It won’t be easy to represent a lot of them accurately and still be TV friendly.

The Internet allows for a far greater degree of freedom than television. It will be interesting to see how far this trend continues, as some viewers may find the TV versions of such material unsatisfactory after some of the edge has been taken off.

Twitter can’t seem to get their act straightened out with an integrated retweet function.  Granted, retweeting was not an official feature and came from the community.  Still, after countless 3rd party applications found a way to integrate retweeting into their apps, Twitter gave it a try last week.

And then they removed it.

I’m not so sure that people really liked Twitter’s native retweet function to begin with.  It simply wasn’t flexible enough, as it would not allow you to modify the message prior to retweeting.

Skipping ahead to yesterday, Posterous announced seamless retweeting into its already to use lifestreaming software.

Posterous has been on a tear, and fills the middle ground between microblogging and blogging.  Popular bloggers such as Steve Rubel have sworn off blogging in favor of this nimble utility.

Does that mean that Posterous will overtake Twitter? Not likely anytime soon, they aren’t in the same league:

Still, it makes you wonder if Twitter will remain top dog forever, as more of the social web aims for a piece of the digital pie.

It’s beautiful out in Austin today, but something about a sunny day in the Texas hill country pales in comparison to the shots we’re getting on Google’s new street views of Honolulu. Dayyyummmm.

Who’s making the Piña Coladas?

Report a problem? No problems here.

As seen on Matt Cutts‘ blog, Google Caffeine is set to be deployed full-scale right after the holidays.

Although Matt has stated several times that there should be no major notable changes in the search results, we believe that social media / real time updates will have greater impact in the overhauled search engine.  Interestingly, Google has taken down the sandbox, the area in which you used to be able to compare results over the last few months.

Our take is that Google Caffeine is Google’s response to Bing.  If you have noticed, Bing’s index updates at a much faster rate than Google.

Social media is likely going to be a more predominant role in search in the upcoming months.  Twitter has signed definitive agreements with Google and Microsoft, and Google has been rolling out Google Wave, Sidewiki, and has better universal search results (better music integration has been the latest).  Only time will tell.

Much of the reason for Firefox’s vulnerability has to do with the plug-ins that the browser allows. The browser has made a number of moves this year to boost plug-in security, but the efforts have for the most part proven futile. According to Lars Ewe, CTO of Cenzic, the company that produced the vulnerability report, Firefox’s plug-ins are somewhat of a catch 22.

“The plug-in architecture that they have is a selling fact for the browser and one of the reasons why I love using it,” Ewe told internetnews.com. They can’t control security aspects of all the plug-ins and the vulnerabilities are a side effect of that.”

Cenzic reported that Opera had the lowest vulnerability rating (6%).

These figures are obviously telling, but it goes without saying that they’re a little skewed. Aside from their plug-in use, Firefox’s traction has grown significantly in recent years. They’re a much more popular site than they used to be, and it’s starting to show in adverse ways. With hackers and virus makers around, it’s usually the case that the more popular you get, the more defense you’ve got to play.

Rupert Murdoch’s worldwide news empire is teetering on the edge of inevitable irrelevancy these days, threatening to withdraw its pages from SERPs – to which Google has said “Be our guest” – and laying out preliminary plans to start charging for content across the board. That means paying for The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post in America, and 33 different periodicals (including The Sun, The Times, and The Australian) in English speaking countries around the world.

A pretty tall task, but it actually wouldn’t be that difficult. All Murdoch would need to do would be to put a short, little text request into his code and his enterprise could disappear from Google forever. The challenge then would be twofold.

First, News Corp would have to find a way to maintain the steady flow of traffic they currently experience in part because sites like wsj.com and the Daily Telegraph in Australia currently have a strong presence on Google news searches.

Second, Murdoch would have to find a way to convince all those who get to his sites to fill out all the necessary forms and pay up for something that’s free only a few clicks of the mouse over.

Mr. Murdoch has obviously proven himself a pretty fluid businessman over the years, but something about this screams out-of-touch. Murdoch has the right idea that there will come a day when the general public will need to pay for their news, but it looks like the Aussie’s jumping the gun. Yes, 78-year-olds like him still enjoy picking up the paper every day, but, as Gawker explains, news is picked up these days by “stick[ing] a hot, throbbing search query into Google.” All the cool kids are doing it these days.

Twitter releases Twitter Lists Widgets

On September 27th, 2006, GrandCentral founders Craig Walker and Vincent Pacquet unleashed their company’s vision at the Fall DEMO conference in front of a crowd of eager investors. Their basic principle was simple: your phone number shouldn’t be tied to a device or a location, it should be tied to you.

Chapter 1: One Number for All Your Phones Forever

Mr. Walker then enumerated the implications of this simple idea:

• No matter how many phones you have, you will only have one phone number and it will never change.
• Because of this, you will check all voicemail in one place.
• You will be able to customize everything about this phone – from voicemail to what phones ring and when – from the web.

“Never miss a call you want to take,” he stated, “and never take a call you want to miss.”

Although there were reservations about the quality of the still-very-beta service, the idea behind it was revolutionary and the web management of its features very well thought-out. Plus, GrandCentral was willing to issue you a new phone number FOR FREE and let you connect all of your existing phone numbers to it.

But there was even more the service could offer. Customization allowed incoming phone calls to ring to different phones depending on the caller, calls could be easily transferred from one phone to another, and, at any point, a portion of a call could be recorded live by simply pressing the number four on your phone’s keypad.

The features with voicemail were just as impressive. At the onset of any call, users could listen to voicemail messages being recorded in real time by callers and jump in with the click of a button. Via the online customization, users could also set rules to let certain callers here different, personalized voicemail messages. Finally voicemails were stored indefinitely, could be listened to with a single click, and replied to with another – by calling both the user’s phone and the phone number of the person they wished to speak with.

Needless to say, Craig Walker and Vincent Pacquet walked away from DEMO Fall 2006 with rave reviews of their company and a blogger buzz to fuel the fire.

Chapter 2: The Initial Stumbling Blocks and then….BAM! You’re part of Google

In spite of its promise, GrandCentral came out of private beta in early March of 2007 – only six months later – and was met with some broad disapproval from its users. There was always the initial hurdle of getting other people to use your new GrandCentral number, but now people were complaining that the service itself didn’t work properly. Phone calls were sometimes never received and people whose numbers were actually “whitelisted” and were supposed to go through right to the caller were often halted and made to leave a message before the caller could pick up.

One consumer even commented on a Techcrunch blog about GrandCentral that he was “amazed that people are OK with the call quality… Try having somebody call your GrandCentral number from a cellphone and then answer the call from a cellphone. It’s like talking on a walkie talkie from the 70’s!”

The main benefit of the service also became one of the largest reasons to abandon it. If you were going to put a great deal of time and effort into getting people to only call one number for you from now on, and that number was never going to change, then you’d better be damn sure the service was going to work the way it’s supposed to. At least for the time being, that wasn’t the case.

As Craig Walker promised, however, improvements we’re in the works. And only a month after coming out of private beta, Grand Central launched the mobile version of its service. A lightweight rendition of its standard version, the mobile service had all the same basic functionality of the web-based software and also allowed you to access your address book and make changes to your account settings and call routing. Voicemails, however, were recorded in mp3 format, so your phone needed an mp3 player if you wanted to listen to your messages. Finally, and almost as a hint of things to come, GrandCentral mobile also provided users with “Visual Voicemail” – the ability to see voicemails from certain people and delete them without listening to them – which was to be a feature of the then-upcoming iPhone.

All of this commotion quickly grabbed the attention of Google, who, no less than two months later bought Grand Central for a cool $50+ million. Many believed they would use the technology to challenge companies like Skype in web-based communications software.

Problems that Google fixed and how:

Although they kept Craig Walker as part of the new Google team, the company remained virtually unheard of for 21 months after its acquisition. Several critical problems with the service were addressed during this time, and just after its re-launch as Google Voice in March 2009, several new features were announced.

• You used to have to give everyone your Google voice number and ask that everyone call that number from now on. To fix this, Google introduced “Number Portability” – (Edit: This is actually a future release. Stay tuned for it.) – allowing you to port your existing number to your Google Voice number, so that every time someone called your cell phone number your Google voice number would actually be the number dialed.
• Even with this number portability, outbound calls used to show the number of the cell phone you were calling from, not your Google voice number.
• Google fixed this issue by creating Smartphone apps for the Blackberry, iPhone and android phones that actually rerouted all outbound calls through your Google Voice number. A similar problem existed for outbound SMS messages, but Google cleared this up in a similar fashion.

Chapter 3: Apple and Google’s Ugly Split

That’s when the levees broke. Apple removed third party Google Voice apps from the app store and – although they denied doing so in their letter to the FCC 3 weeks later – flat out rejected the Google Voice Mobile app for the iPhone. The resulting fallout over these decisions and the growing belief that it was AT&T that was behind them prompted the FCC to send letters to all three companies to clear up exactly what happened.

Apple claimed that it had not “rejected” the official Google Voice Mobile app for the iPhone but rather “was still considering it.” Nevertheless, they did mention that this app “duplicated” certain core iPhone features such as Visual Voicemail and the native dialer, and this was the primary reason why the app had not yet been accepted into the app store.

AT&T insisted that it was not them who was behind Apple’s decision making, and Google’s statements to the FCC we’re redacted for public consideration.

Then, despite their declaration that they didn’t have anything to do with banning Google Voice from the iPhone, AT&T sent a complaint letter to the FCC saying that Google – through Google Voice – was guilty of violating Net Neutrality standards set forth by the FCC: proof in itself that AT&T had a problem with Google Voice.  What made this more bizarre was that AT&T had openly opposed Net Neutraility standards for mobile carriers. Now they were being accused of carrying out a double standard on the issue.

You could say Google’s playing a bit of a double standard as well, blocking certain calls made to and from AT&T carrier phones. Just last week they were brought under the microscope again for suggesting they “be let off the hook because [they've] cut back on the calls [they] block” to iPhones.

But for now, the beat goes on. We can only hope that the two sides start to play nice, because I like Googling things on my iPhone. And I’d hate to lose that commodity when the dust finally, eventually, hopefully settles on the ballad of Google and Apple.

It’s not just lyric sites and links to YouTube videos anymore. Google’s newly developed Discover Music function may be the best way to listen to choice songs yet, top-level sound quality that you can stream straight from a search results page. I decided to try it out with one of my favorite songs from 2008.

Here’s what happened when I typed “Delta Spirit trashcan” into the search bar.

All you’ve got to do is press play and a new box pops up streaming the song pretty immediately. Usually it’s on Lala.com, which Lala founder Bill Nguyen says is intentional, but you can also stream most songs on iLike (which was recently purchased by Myspace), Pandora and Rhapsody. From there you can buy the song as an mp3 or click on for album, song, or artist information.

What’s sweeter: if you don’t know the name of a song, Google can still find it for you. Say you’re driving home, listening to the radio, and you hear “Trashcan.” When you get into your house you want to listen again, but the DJ never said the name of the song. All you remember is the infectious chorus.

With Discover Music, all you have to do is type “My love is coming I can barely hardly wait” into Google’s search bar and you get the same results as typing “Delta Spirit Trashcan.”

It should be noted that Discover Music is great and will be useful to all kinds of people, but it’s not the “iTunes killer” everybody originally hailed it as. Odds are that it’ll stay a step or two below Apple’s dominant music player until Discover can start streaming albums.