Verecom Web Design Blog

Twitter, a free social network and Microblogging service, has recently added a new search functionality, which the market considers as Google Killer. Google was proposed to acquire rival Twitter, however, CEO Eric Schmidt said there will not be any acquisitions happening in the near future, partly because the rival is too expensive.

Googles new aroused competitor Twitter has become mainstream since last year. Its development speed has far exceeded the response from traditional media. After purchasing Summize search engine last summer, Twitter has gradually become a search engine that contains all users’ profiles.

Apparently, Twitter user’s amount has reached 6 million. According to IT industry, it is estimated that the number of users of Google and Yahoo! are 100 times and 90 times of Twitter respectively. Facebook, founded the same time as Twitter, also has 50 times more users in the network. Although Twitter was said to be only popular within IT industry and media industry, but analyst is optimistic that its users will increase up to 600 million. Last year it was said that Facebook intended to acquire the company with 500 million, but was rejected by Twitter.

According to news report, Google, although has been the leader in search engine industry, has been criticised being too big and too unwieldy. Google can deliver large amount of search result, but users have to attempt the results by clicking in the sequence, and 99% is considered as Spam information.

The new search service launched by Twitter is said to provide more relevant data. By clicking the newly added “Trends” button, 10 most popular results will be displayed in the drop down list, where users could directly select the result. Twitter Community is considered to be the information selected by professional team, users could also choose to establish a profession level community network with the people of the same interest, and then can filter and evaluate websites, logs, videos etc. at any time, without the need to click any links.

Technology blog “TechCrunch” founder Michael Arrington has given it a high rating, saying that Twitter is not only a Microblogging service, but also more likely to turn into a search engine, as a supplement to Google.

Recently British technology news website TechRadar proposed that if Google wants to become more powerful, they have to start acquire six companies including Twitter. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said to the American media on the 6th April, ‘Google is unlikely to buy anything in the near future, partly because the Twitter’s price is too high at present. Eric Schmidt also said “Google still has a lot of funds, but the bad news is we are still looking for the most ideal acquisition and model”.

Edited By Dan Li

Recently American Internet search engine giant Google will expand its territory to phone market. They will provide single number service to home phone, office phone, and cell phone. And it can turn the voice messages into e-mail texts.

Google Voice is able to turn voice messages to Email or SMS, and send the texts to the inbox in users computers or mobiles.

In the presentation video which is posted in Google office blog, it declared that : when you receive voice messages, Google Voice will automatically reverse them into texts and let you read the content of this voice message.”

However, the presentation video also pointed out that the texts are rewritten through “fully automatic” speech recognition technology, so it “may contain some errors”.

At this moment, this service is only provided to the current users of GrandCentral, the telephone company run by Google. Google, whose headquarter is located in Mountain View California acquired Grandcentral on July 2007. However, Google also said that in the next few weeks, company will start to provide free services for new users to use Google Voice.

Edited By Vicky Yin

Recently, famous web community website Facabook announced that the information sharing product Facebook Connect, which was released last May, would support Apple iPhone/iPod Touch in next few weeks. Facebook user only needs one set of password to log in all these sites. However, this effort was also questions by many users. They felt that Facebook was selling the privacy of users to advertisers little by little.

Facebook senior platform manager Moline (Dave Morin) on Saturday (Day 14) presented the function of Facebook Connect on iPhone and iPod Touch at the SXSW Interactive Festival seminar, Austin, Texas. It declared that iPhone application users could share with friends and play together. The goal of this effort is to help Facebook, iPhone and iPod Touch together to be the entertainment platforms of next generation.

It has been reported that Apple’s iTunes online store currently has nine applications support Facebook Connect. The majority of them are games, including the Top Game “Who has the Biggest Brain” on facebook which developed by Playfish company; SGN’s new spy game “Agency Wars”, the restaurant guide “Urbanspoon”, movie discussion forum “Flixster” and other games and positioning softwares.

The primary function of Facebook Connect is to allow users to links on their Facebook account through other websites. It also allow users to carry basic personal information, personal profit pictures such as name, friends, photos, activities, groups and other true identity information. In privacy authority part, Facebook Connect allows users to set their own public information and users can remove the friends list at any time as well.

In addition, Facebook Connect also open the social network, which used for developers to assess the users. As long as someone cooperates with Facebook, they will be allowed to use the personal data in Facebook. The other websites which link with Facebook can gain activity information of the friends on this site as well, for example, the movies his friend checking on certain website, or sharing with the friends the activity information in different websites.

Early this February, Facebook has modified the terms of use. The modified contents have been criticised as “intense to invade and occupy the information users posted on the site” by the objectors. This made many users dissatisfied and triggered protest. Facebook had to pose a brief statement on 18th to declare that its Terms of Use will be “temporarily” return to the previous status. Some media indicated that Facebook’s attempt on using its 1,75billions users resources to set up a new profit-making mode was frustrated again.

Edited By Vicky Yin

When Google just released their own web browser, the Google Chrome, it received great attention and high expectation from the public and the download rate used to break record. However, through time goes by, other browsers such as Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera have renewed their software quickly,

this made Google Chrome lose its radiance gradually, Fortunately, Google official blog has announced that recently, they had provided new Google Chrome trial version for web users to download in order to retrieve their reputation.

According to the information provided by Google official site, the best thing for new Google Chrome version is its speed has been increased greatly: compare the speed of new version with the old through V8 benchmark from Google itself, the operation speed of the new version increased 25%; if using Sunspider benchemark to make the comparison, the speed has increased 35% than the old version. The more important fact is that operation speed of new version seems improved nearly one time comparing with the former trial software.

The only one flaw of Google Chrome is, not like Firefox, Opera and Safari which support multi platforms, currently it only support Microsoft Windows Vista or XP SP2+ system. Wish Google Chrome development team won’t let Mac and Linux users wait for to long…

Edited By Vicky Yin

According to the latest statistic report from Hitwise, a well-known market research agency, Yahoo ranked first in market share among top ten portal sites in US, its market share has reached 60.47%.Moreover, and the total market share of Yahoo Company can be nearly 70% in portal sites market. With that of My Yahoo! which ranked third.

This number is very considerable. It indicated that Yahoo portal business is still very stable; its leading position is unshakable even after going through a period of disorder reform time.

MSN from Microsoft ranked second, the market share of MSN was 19.22%. My Yahoo! occupied 7.3% market share and take the third position while AOL, which used to be very popular only ranked fourth with 4.33% market share. None of the following portal sites includes Mail com, My MSN, can reach 1% market share. Therefore, although they are still in the list, none of they will be able to challenge the status of top three sites including Yahoo.

Edited By Vicky Yin

When Yahoo celebrates its 5th anniversary of the birthday, ComScore give Yahoo a gift, that is, the report of rising share of Yahoo search engine.

According to ComScore report, one month later from February 2008, Yahoo search engine market share increased 0.5 percent and reached 21 percent in US.

Not only Yahoo, Microsoft Live search engine share also increased 2.0 percent, and reached 8.5 percent in US market. The same time, Google search engine market share decreased 0.5 percent, and its current market share is 63 percent.

In fact, from December 2008 to January 2009, the 3 mainstream search engines have fairly good growth, but Yahoo and Microsoft’s growth rate was even better. Their search volume growths are 9% and 8%, which are higher than the average growth value 7 percent. And in the United States, the total search volume increased to 135 billion times from 125 billion times.

Edited By Henry Lu