Coming to Google Labs: Social search results

SAN FRANCISCO--Google Vice President Marissa Mayer made a surprise announcement at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday: "Social Search," a new Google Labs experiment that will bring in search results from a member's social-network contact circle.

It'll be launching as an opt-in project in the next few weeks. Then, you'll need to have a Google account and set up a Google Profile to fill in information about the social networks that you use. Google first launched Profiles about a year ago.

"What we've done here is inserted, on the bottom of the page, content written by people in your social network," Mayer said, adding that Google hopes this will "really improve the overall relevance, comprehensiveness, and quality" of search results. A search for a local restaurant, for example, could bring up your friends' Yelp reviews for the same establishment. A search for travel destinations could bring up a post from a friend's blog.

This comes on the same day that Google announced that it had entered into an agreement with Twitter to bring real-time "tweets" to search results. That's another product that has yet to actually launch.

"The idea is for...these fast-rising queries, where there's a period of time (when there are) actually tweets about that topic, and the definitive news source hasn't been written yet," Mayer said of the Twitter partnership, declining to disclose its financial terms.

This post was updated at 4:25 p.m. PT.

Facebook pushes out restructured news feeds

A look at the newly tweaked Facebook homepage.

(Credit: Facebook)

Facebook members will start to see a new look for their homepage "news feeds" on Friday, with the design now featuring a toggle view between a main view, featuring the top stories from their friends list based on their Facebooking habits, and a "live feed" featuring real-time updates from their whole network.

"When the user wakes up in the morning, you go to Facebook and you see (the) news feed," product manager Peter Deng told CNET News. "You see the stuff that you missed, the best of the previous day, to basically catch you up on what your friends have been up to."

This is sort of bringing Facebook's design back to an earlier version. This spring,likely inspired by the hype surrounding Twitter's "stream," Facebook converted its homepage news feed into a feed of live updates and relegated "highlights" to a small column on the right side of the page. Plenty of members absolutely hated it, even though Facebook execs have since said that the redesign didn't result in a drop in traffic or usage.

Deng said that the design released Friday, which will be rolling out to the social network's massive user base over the course of the day starting at 10 a.m. Pacific time, was put together by "responding to a lot of feedback along the way."

Birthday and event alerts are now more prominent, and the news feed also contains stories that stopped appearing when Facebook launched the stream-inspired homepage: relationship status news, photos added and tagged, and the like. Brands' fan pages will be worked in there too, but Deng said that Facebook does not allow them to pay for higher placement or prominence. User controls will stay the same: you can opt to see fewer updates from a given person or fan page.

The upcoming redesign was leaked earlier this week via a document distributed to advertisers. But Deng said that the company has "made a few user interface tweaks since then."

Google adds more personalization to Reader

Google has added new personalization features to Reader, its RSS feed aggregator, the company wrote in a blog post Thursday.

One new feature is dubbed Popular Items. Using algorithms, Reader will "find top-rising images, videos and pages from anywhere (not just your subscriptions)." From there, the app will lump all those pieces in the new Popular Items section. Based on a user's subscriptions and what someone is reading, Reader orders those stories by what it thinks a person likes best.

Reader's recommendations have been moved to the app's Explore section. Google also renamed it Recommended Sources. Like before, that feature will employ the user's Reader Trends and Web History to find a list of feeds he or she might like.

To make it easier for users to find the information they're most likely to care about, all Reader feeds now feature a sort option called Magic. According to Google, Magic "reorders items in the feed based on your personal usage, and overall activity in Reader, instead of default chronological order." Google said that the ranking is tailored to the user. The more the user clicks the "like" and "share" buttons on stories, the better the Magic sort will be.

Here is the Magic setting in action:

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Sergey Brin: Yahoo shouldn't abandon search

Battelle said Brin had been extended an invitation to speak but turned it down, to which Brin joked, "I didn't say no, I just never responded."

But it was an appropriate time to hear from one of the minds behind Google because one of the most evident trends at the conference is that the search market is heating back up. On Wednesday alone, Microsoft announced a partnership with Twitter and Facebook for real-time search results, Google announced a similar deal with Twitter, and Google executive Marissa Mayer previeweda new "social search" feature in Google Labs.

Brin talked about the new competition with a "bring it on" attitude. "I think what Bing has reminded us is that search is a very competitive market," he said. "There are many interesting companies out there." He said he's disappointed that Yahoo is retreating from the fight and planning to strike a deal with Microsoft instead.

"I think Yahoo had a number of innovations there, and I wish they would continue to innovate in search," Brin said. He didn't go into specifics.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz had been slated to speak at the conference on Wednesday but canceled at the last minute, citing a bad case of the flu.

Originally posted at The Social

Tech advice from Tim Berners-Lee

SAN FRANCISCO--When Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, entered the room for the final interview at the Web 2.0 Summit, the audience stood up for him.

Appropriately so, since most of those present here Thursday owe their livelihoods to his invention. In an on-stage interview with Tim O'Reilly, the audience was listening to Berners-Lee not just for his perspective but his guidance. While not explicitly called out in the discussion, there was good advice in what he had to say. Here's what I heard:

Don't build your laws into the Web. "Technology shouldn't tell you what's right and what's wrong," Berners-Lee said. "The rule of law applies on the Web. It's a platform for humanity." He does not appear believe that it is appropriate to code local laws onto the global platform, preferring to leave enforcement to existing means--police and courts.

Fault-tolerance is vital. Responding to question from O'Reilly about the "404" page being one of the critical inventions on the Web, Berners-Lee said, "It was a trade-off and a design choice." But, he added, "The great thing is you can write a bunch of links and you don't have to wait" for them all to work. Building a tight system where everything is guaranteed to work is possible in smaller configurations but not on a global scale.

If you want it everywhere, give it away. The Twitter founders must have heard this message before they built their product. When asked why Berners-Lee never thought about charging for the Web, the answer was practical and capitalistic. "Because we wanted it everywhere," He said. "We wanted an URL for every page." And he got it. Ubiquity would not have been possible with competing, paid hypertext systems.

Large companies are the enemy. I'm interpreting here, from this statement: "I'm worried about anything large coming in to take control, whether it's large companies or government." For example, he said that large social networks like Facebook end up with undue control over communications because they are not open to other systems. As he said, in the old days of e-mail, you could e-mail anyone, anywhere, from any system. They all interconnected. With large, closed systems, users cede control to the owners.

Small open companies can topple big closed ones. Berners-Lee believes that if you have small companies that connect to each other in an open way (for example, small social networks using a standard to connect their networks), then it's possible that the lone, closed system, no matter how large, can fail.

Separate design from device. The growth of mobile devices is one example of how thinking about Web design for one size screen--a PC or laptop--can cut a product off from growth. Another: not considering the increase in the number of users with "huge screens" on which a design created for, say, and 800x600 Flash window, will appear tiny and weak.

Consider content as app. Thanks to HTML 5, which Berners-Lee calls a competing platform more than a content standard, Web pages can turn into widgets, and some apps won't be distinguishable from Web pages.

Forge trust. Berners-Lee says, "One of the whole gating factors of getting the whole world of Web apps to take off is trust." He says that when Web apps get data from different services and those services similarly reach out to others, how do users, customers, and companies ever learn to trust a single site? What's the solution? He doesn't know, but believes it's an opportunity: "If we get a really good solution to the problem, then Web apps will be amazing."

Make the Web work for more people. As Berners-Lee says, only 20 percent to 25 percent of humans uses the Web even though 80 percent "have signal," that is, they could get on the Web where they are if they had the tools or desire to do so. He believes that one of the reasons use of the Web is lower than its availability is that much of the Web isn't designed for all cultures. The World Wide Web Foundation is Berners-Lee's platform for pushing for more Web access for the world. He puts the challenge this way: "It's about figuring out what is the little thing we can tweak so that people can get online, 15 years before they would otherwise?" More people connected means more empowered people. Which, by the way, means more of a market for Web inventors.

Originally posted at Rafe's Radar

Online places to find public-domain multimedia

If you're a blogger, you know that finding images, videos, and audio for your blog without worry of copyright issues can be difficult. Either the content is copyrighted, or you need to pay for it. In either case, it's not as tempting as freely available, copyright-free media.

Luckily, there are resources across the Web that allow you to use multimedia content for free with some simple attribution. It's a great way to add interesting flavor to your blog without worry of copyright issues.

Let's take a look:

Go public

Creative Commons A search for public-domain multimedia content usually starts with Creative Commons. The site is one of the best places to go, if you're looking for content to add to your blog.

When you get to Creative Commons, you'll find a search box where you can input a query. From there, a handy tabbed-browsing interface is shown, allowing you to send your query to Google search, Google Images, Flickr, and more.

Creative Commons' site is quick to point out that all the searches bring you to third-party sites, and there's no guarantee that the content is free to use, but you'll notice under the search box that the page automatically searches for content that's "free to use, share, or modify, even commercially."

I've used the search engine on numerous occasions and had some success using it. Try out Creative Commons, if you want to search several sites for some photos.

Creative Commons' tabbed search feature.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

EveryStockPhoto EveryStockPhoto is a search engine for those who want free, public-domain photos to use on their site.

Overall, I was really impressed by EveryStockPhoto. When you get to the site, you have the option of viewing photos in popular categories or using the page's prominent search box to find photos. When you search the site, it finds images from several resources, including many of those mentioned in this roundup. Flickr is one of its most used sources.

When you click on an image in EveryStockPhoto, you can see who owns it, the licensing rights associated with it, and more. I really liked EveryStockPhoto. Check it out.

EveryStockPhoto helps you find public-domain images across the Web.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Flickr Flickr is home to millions of protected photos, but it also features a slew of Creative Commons content that you can use for free on your blog.

The first thing to do when you start using Flickr's search is to learn what each attribution category requires you to do. Some photo licenses require you to merely give credit and link back to the source, while others ask that no photos be used for commercial purposes. Depending on your needs, you can search Flickr for photos that fall within your requirements.

Overall, Flickr's catalog of photos is outstanding. There are more than 100 million photos for you to sift through. You can search the site or browse photos. In either case, you'll need to be sure what the owner of the content requires from you, if you place a photo on your site. I use Flickr's Creative Commons search service on an almost daily basis.

Flickr features lots of open content on its site.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Internet Archive: Audio If you're looking for audio in the public domain, try out Internet Archive: Audio. The site features clips on a wide range of categories.

When you find an audio clip on the site, you have the option (in some cases) of streaming the content or downloading it to your computer. In either case, be sure to check out the attribution requirements. I've found that while some folks don't mind you taking their music and putting into a production of your own, others require some attribution.

Internet Archive: Audio features several audio files.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Internet Archive: Movies Although it's the same site, I thought it was important to break out Internet Archive: Movies. With so much content available for the taking, it shouldn't be grouped with audio.

When you get to Internet Archive: Movies, you'll find short clips, all the way up to feature-length films. Whether you're looking to add some clips to your video podcast or you just want to check out some videos, this site is a great place to find content. When you find a clip that you want, you have the option of downloading it to your PC. Like the site's Audio page, you do need to remember to attribute the owner of the content, depending on what they ask for on a particular clip's listing page. Overall, I was impressed by the site's content.

Find the right film for just about anything you need.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Wikimedia Wikimedia Commons has some of the best content of any site in this roundup.

When you first get to Wikimedia, you'll find more than 5 million files that are freely available for use across the Web. The content ranges from photos to audio clips to video. You can search the site to find what you want or sift through its many categories to browse its selection of files. When you click on a file, you'll see a description of associated attribution requirements. As long as you follow those requirements, you can use the file wherever you desire.

Wikimedia Commons features several categories to choose from.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Yahoo Creative Commons Search One of Yahoo's most handy tools is the site's Creative Commons search page. The service, which is still in beta, allows you to find content for commercial purposes or that which you can modify.

Yahoo Creative Commons search works quite well. Simply input a query, check the appropriate boxes that match what you're looking for in a picture, and the service will return results that match it. Instead of listing photos, though, you'll see links to pages that Yahoo says contain photos matching your request. In my experience, there are quite a few results listed.

Yahoo Creative Commons features several results.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

My top 3

1. Wikimedia: More than photos, Wikimedia is a great tool for finding content in the public domain.

2. Creative Commons: Seems rather obvious, doesn't it? Creative Commons is a must-see.

3. Flickr: If you're just looking for photos, Flickr is probably the best way to find them.

Originally posted at Webware

Exclusive: Easing XP Netbook owners' path to Windows 7

After months of grappling with the issue of how to allow Windows XP Netbook owners to move to Windows 7, Microsoft is ready with its answer.

Starting on Thursday, Microsoft is adding a tool to its online store that will allow those who buy Windows 7 to create a bootable USB drive with the operating system that can then be used to upgrade a Netbook.

"There are lots of XP Netbooks out there," Microsoft's Chris Flores said in an interview. "We wanted to make it as easy as possible for the enthusiasts that want to do this."

Microsoft plans to make available on Thursday a tool that will walk users through the process of moving a downloaded copy of Windows 7 onto a USB drive, be that a memory stick or portable hard drive.

The challenge is that Netbook owners must still tweak their computer's BIOS (Basic Input Output System) to look for a USB drive before booting off the PC's hard drive.

"We're still not recommending this for the average person," Flores said. A rule of thumb is that if a user doesn't understand what is meant by tweaking the BIOS, they probably shouldn't do it.

Consumers should also make sure their USB drive has at least 4GB of free space and check Microsoft's compatibility center and run an upgrade adviser to make sure both their hardware and software will work with Windows 7.

Originally posted at Beyond Binary