According to a 2004 eye/click tracking study (Eye-tracking analysis of user behavior in WWW search) done at Cornell University on Google results page, users spend about 50% of the time on the page reading the snippet of the first and second results, and 14% to read the third one.
According to some statistics the large majority of Wii’s bought stop being used after about 6 months. Nintendo’s own statistics reveal that the revolutionary Wii Fit is used on average only 4 times by each customer. Pretty lame.
So, what else can this machine do? Play DVD and old Super Nintendo Games (SNES) to start with. Carve 30 minutes our of your next weekend, find a SD card reader and follow the following pointers.
This year for my Christmas trip I will have the pleasure to fly oversea with British Airways. Although I have taken many of their planes in the past, it was always for short trips, and I never tested first-hand if their in-flight experience really justifies the usually higher prices.
Today, invited by an apparently impossible condition that showed up on OneRiot‘s servers I pushed my good friend Alessandro to prove me wrong. And as usual, in about 15 minutes, he did.
The odd condition was the following: server A was listening on a port and server B was connected to it. We turned off server A and after a few minutes server B was connected to itself on that port, although it was not listening on it.
Further investigation on the RFC 793 (page 23), and 20 lines of C code written by Alessandro, showed that is intentionally possible to connect two sockets together without calling listen() on any of the two. It is called “Simultaneous Connection Synchronization”.
On our server pure chance is what generated the condition. Server B kept trying to connect to server A cycling through the ephemeral ports allowed by the OS until accidentally the source port was the same as the destination port.
From now on our ephemeral ports range will be outside of our server ports range. I strongly recommend you to do the same especially if you run multiple services on the same box.
Anybody who studied Computer Science in college will probably remember the Publish-Subscriber model from some of the introductory classes. When simple poll models, in which who is interested in new data constantly asks for it, are too expensive or not scalable, everybody switches to a push model, in which who is interested in the data (subscriber) let the creator (publisher) know and will receive updates whenever there is something new. This was invented in 1987.
It seems that after the usual gazillion of user testing the folks at Google finally settled on a new shiny search interface. In short, I like it!
We have to admit, the choice of colors, the shape of the buttons, and the use of big text resembles a little the Ask 3D interface that we launched in Ask.com in June 2007, but I think the visual impact is very nice and clean.
The menu on the left allows you to narrow down your search (and I am sure it is sorted by what people use the most for each query) in categories like News, Videos or Images, explore more about the topic with some related searches or specify a date range for the results.
Although the interface changed they apparently abandoned the idea of “abusing” the #fragment in the URL to run the searches through AJAX (as some sites like Collecta are now doing to increase their SEO/page-rank) like they were testing a few months ago. I am glad of this choice, it was just confusing.
My only question is why are they leaving the top menu in the result page. It is clear that by then the user had no intention of logging in or clicking on the Gmail link, and if they do want to switch to a different search category it can be done more comfortably using the left menu. I would remove it.
Also the homepage has been updated with a more colorful and bubbly style, that matches the results page.
However, some users w
ill see yet a different (and much uglier, in my opinion) version of it, which resembles the old-style Google homepage but with no upper menus nor bottom links.Those links will fade in if you leave your cursor for about a third of a second in their areas. Apparently a lot of studies went into that, up to the length of the pause (in milliseconds!) after which the text fades in.
I never heard of Elena Kalis before today, but I think she did a great job in her photographic project Alice in Waterland.
Below you will find some of the pictures I liked the most. What do you think? Pretty impressive, uh?
Since FriendFeed has been acquired by Facebook, Twitter started reducing their access to the tweet stream with the clear intent of penalizing the company. It is obviously a good move from Twitter, and although the authors of TechCrunch complains about it, I can not really see why they should not be doing it.
Apparently the first tier of Last.fm’s servers uses SSD disks to increase throughput of the data. They use those servers as cache, pushing on there the songs that people are likely to listen the most for the day. Not a bad idea, considering that the prices are going down (e.g., about $280 for 160Gb).
IZEA is pushing for its sponsored tweets model. We all knew this moment would have arrived and that is not the first attempt to monetize the stream. People already complain about it but there are already millions of blogs out there created with the sole purpose of making money so what is the difference?
I spent a lot of good summers in a Club Med village in Caprera, an enchanted island of Sardegna. Next to our residence there was a cool-looking US Navy base. In the past few years both sites have been closed with the promise of improvements but everything has yet to happen. Some lights have been on for years by now!
A 25 years old guy in a small town of Italy faked to be sick at work to be visited by the nearby doctor (a female). Once in her clinic he sexually harassed her. How can people think to be able to get away with these things?
I am personally really impressed by the folks at Google lately. Sure, they have always been great in search, but in the past few weeks I have seen so many good products, ideas and business deals coming out of their lab which is hard to ignore.
First, they made a deal with Twitter only within hours of the Microsoft-Twitter deal. Our beloved Microsoft probably talked with Twitter for months. Google, once the news came out, probably made it happen in a few phone calls.
A few days later, they became a lot more serious about Google Voice, releasing the product to the general public. I use it (well, just for the voicemail for now). It is not perfect yet, but definitively has the cheapest VoIP fares. And you can’t avoid to be impressed by the voicemail transcription (scarily accurate) and the free SMS (even international). Google Voice was build on top of GrandCentral, and if that was not enough, they recently bought Gizmo5, the biggest VoIP player on the internet.
Recently, they also launched Google Maps Navigation going in direct competition with Garmin and TomTom, which stocks fell of a 12% on the day of the announcement. People seem very happy with this navigation software.
The Google AdSense Platform is already the biggest and most powerful ads platform of the web. Not just for the impression counts: serving their Ads from http://www.google.com thanks to the clever use of an iFrame, allows them to set a cookie on your browser and practically follow you everywhere even measuring how long you stay on a page. It’s a genius idea for ranking! I remember how a few years ago we were talking in Ask.com about buying DoubleClick exactly for that purpose, but then we did not move on it and Google did. And now, they even conquered the mobile Ads space buying AdMob, the biggest player in the area.
For years people have been talking of a Google OS, and a few months ago the project was confirmed. Apparently, they are only a few weeks away from launch. I can just imagine all the Christmas’ netbooks which will have this OS on top of them. At the same time, their browser Google Chrome, keeps improving and spreading around. I do not use it because I do not want to give all my browsing data to them, but it is the best browser around, especially now that they finalized extensions support.
A few weeks ago they also launched Go, their own programming language. They unfortunately have choosen a bad name because was already used but if the language compiles and performs as they say, it is impressive. There is already a primitive Twitter Status updater written using it! On a similar note, they released also a set of JavaScript libraries to make the life of users easier.
More recently, they updated their Picasa Software to version 3.5. I have to admit, although I hate the lack of a native Linux version (it runs in a special version of Wine for now) it is an amazing piece of software. You can easily add to it all your new pictures, tag them, and create virtual albums which can then be quickly and automatically uploaded on your web account. And the face recognition functionality is just amazing. It is even synced with your Google Mail Addressbook and learns!
Finally, if all this was not enough, they are apparently launching their own phone in January!
If these 593 words were not enough to describe my feelings: I am really impressed. Google, you are good.
According to my most recent studies Twitter currently receives about 26 Million tweets per day. It is impressive, especially if you consider that in January 2009 they were hovering around “only” 2.4 Million daily tweets!
My latest analysis of the stream say that in October 2009 about 22.3% of all the tweets contain a link. We are talking about almost 5.8 Million of URLs exchanged every day! Of those, 6.2% are pictures and almost 0.1% are videos.
amber rose is discussing. 
love it !!!!!!!!!