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Posts Tagged ‘Page Sponsor’

Twitter Search Is About Popularity

For many people, Twitter offers a larger, more diverse stream of constantly flowing data than they’ve ever had to deal with before in their life. Depending on how many people you follow and how much they tweet, the information can become unmanageable. To that end, we have user lists, third-party clients, Twitter tools and search.

And today, it looks like Twitter has begun working on making this last option – search – more useful for its users by offering the ability to percolate popular search results to the top of the page.

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Jennifer Van Grove at Mashable noticed an update in the Twitter API Google Group this morning that alerts us of a soon-to-come search feature – popular tweets.

From the post on Google Groups:

Until the popular tweet feature all search results have been sorted
chronologically, most recent results at the top. If a search query has any
popular results, those will be returned at the top, even if they are older
than the other results.

Basically, the API will now offer a variable named “result_type” that can will return either “popular” or “recent”. Programs will be able to use the variable to either return search results with popular tweets at the top as default, show only popular results or show only recent results.

Also added to the Twitter API this week are two other variables for the retweet API.

The first will return up to the first 100 user representations of those who
have retweeted the tweet specified in the url by :status_id.

The second will return just the ids of those retweeters for the cases where
that’s all you care about.

Perhaps these have some sort of implication in how tweets will be deemed popular, but even if not, it could be useful in watching the trickle-down spread of a tweet.

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Google Adds Real-Time Updates from Business Owners to Place Pages

Google just launched an interesting update to its Google Local Business Center that makes Place Pages more interesting and interactive. After claiming their business through the Google Local Business Center, business owners can now easily post short updates about their companies on their respective Place Page. In addition, businesses that have been claimed by their owners will now feature a badge that highlights the fact that the actual owner of this business has claimed and improved the page.

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With Place Pages, Google aims to offer “a webpage for every place in the world.” Most users access these pages through searches on Google Maps.

As Google points out in today’s announcement, business owners can use the new “post to your place page” feature to post updates about their businesses directly from their dashboards. This gives local businesses the ability to send out updates about new products or – in the case of local restaurants – to highlight daily specials and new menu items.

It’s also good to see that Google is now giving local business owners the ability to make it clear that they have claimed their Place Pages and improved them with updated information (opening hours, phone numbers, etc.). Even though Google is quite good at generating this information automatically, getting the information directly from the business owners is likely to improve the quality of these listings and will make the information more trustworthy.

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YouTube Launches Real-Time Discussion Search and Tracking

Real-time information is red hot all around the web but it made a surprise appearance on YouTube tonight in the form of real-time search for comments, of all things. YouTube comments are notoriously not worth reading, but now you can search their full text…in real time. There are some very real, potential use-cases crying out for a tool like this. Companies in particular are likely to want to know what people are saying about their names in the comments on YouTube. You name your topic, though: it’s now available for real-time search across viewer discussion.

Real-time search appears to have been rolled out very recently, with no mention, on this page. In addition to search results continuously updated ala Facebook’s newsfeed (”3 new results”) there’s also a frequently-updated list of “trending topics” on the search page.

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Unfortunately, there are no feeds being published to syndicate these search results into a reader off-site. The regular search on YouTube now has RSS feeds and Google Wonder Wheel data being published, so perhaps comment search will have feeds added soon as well.

Proper nouns will likely be of interest to searchers watching YouTube comments. This could be a popular addition to the toolkits of social media watchers everywhere.

What’s the benefit of serving those results up in real time? For certain search queries you don’t want to wait around to find out there’s new results.

What could be next? Presuming this feature is as real as it looks and goes live to the public soon, we’d love to see YouTube support something like the Salmon comment aggregation protocol and publish updates for this and other GData feeds through in a real-time syndication format.

Thanks to Tikva Morowati for the tip. Tikva is the Community Platform Director for KGBWeb, a stealth startup made up of ex-Googlers and others in New York City that will likely make a splash among web-watchers later this year.

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Google’s Search Options Panel Just Got Smarter & Makes Product Research Easier

Google just announced some interesting enhancements to the Search Options side panel it introduced earlier this year. In total, Google is adding nine tools to the sidebar: past hour, specific date range, more shopping sites, fewer shopping sites, visited pages, not yet visited, books, blogs and news. Thanks to this, you can now, for example, restrict search results to sites that were updated within the last hour, or you can tell Google to tweak the number of shopping sites that appear in on a search results page.

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Google will roll these changes out gradually over the course of the day and expects them to be available globally in English by the end of the day.

Fresher Search Results

Until now, if you wanted to see the freshest search results, you had to apply a little URL-hack, but now, this feature has become default in the Search Options panel.

Another interesting new feature is the ability to filter by sites you have already visited or by sites you actually haven’t visited yet. This feature only works when you have signed in to your Google account and have your Web History enabled.

Books, Blogs, and News

Google already introduced the ability to just search for books a few weeks ago, so this isn’t really a new feature, but the company now also allows users to filter by blogs and news. While you could obviously always use Google News or Blog Search for this, you can now easily toggle back and forth between these sources and stay within the same search interface.

Shopping

Given how hard it has become to do product research on Google, as the search results are often cluttered with shopping sites, the ability to see more or fewer shopping sites is probably the most important new feature here. As Google points out, if you are doing research and aren’t ready to buy just yet, being able to tone down the number of shopping sites will be extremely helpful.

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Cartoon: Nothing’s Off The Record

There’s an interesting discussion on Ethan Zuckerman’s blog over a New York Times journalist’s blog post that names an Iranian blogger as a rumored collaborator with the regime in Tehran.

One key thread in that conversation: are the rules different for journalists – for instance, around repeating rumors – when they’re blogging than when they’re writing for the front page?

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It’s an interesting question… but it draws me of the broader question of what rules we follow and ethical lines we draw as social media types, journalists or not. One example: a lot of us do a lot of personal disclosure, and we sometimes drag the people in our lives along with us into the spotlight.

What are your rules? Is any conversation potential blog fodder, or have you drawn sharp, inviolable boundaries in your life?

More Noise to Signal

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