The real-time web just got a lot more competitive with two of the largest search engines in the market announcing deals with Twitter. Both Google and Bing will now show tweets from the microblogging platform in their results pages. Both deals have been speculated for a while and now they've been made official. Google and Twitter have just announced the deal and it will be a while before this has any sort of benefit for the users. “[W]e are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly bene... [read more >>] The online music market is crowded enough as it is and a bunch more services have launched recently. Very few are actually making money from it but there is definitely a lot of potential judging solely by the interest in the market. But, while there are plenty of startups trying to get their hands on a piece of the action, the larger web companies have mostly stayed out of this latest wave of music service. At least that was the case up till now as it looks like Google may be launching its dedicated music service possibly called Google Audio. There are very few details at the moment, but TechCrunch cites multiple sources who claim that th... [read more >>] There's little doubt that YouTube is a huge success when it comes to user numbers as the video site handily dominates the market in all aspects. But, on the day that YouTube celebrates its third year under Google, a little boasting perhaps is appropriate. And when you've got more than one billion views every day you've earned at least some bragging rights. “Three years ago today, Steve and I stood out in front of our offices and jokingly crowned ourselves the burger kings of media. We'd just made headlines by joining with Google in our shared goal of organizing the world's information (in our case, video) an... [read more >>] At the press conference held in New York earlier, Google's top dogs, CEO Eric Schmidt and cofounder Sergey Brin, went through several aspects concerning the company. One of the most important ones, from a technology point of view, was Google Chrome, the company's speedy web browser, and the overall cloud computing environment of which Google is a strong backer. Having been launched for a little over a year, Google Chrome has failed to achieve a considerable market share, hovering at around 3 percent. Some were concerned that this was a sign that the browser wasn't doing as great as Google would want it to be. Both Schmidt a... [read more >>] Google's acquisition of YouTube is one of the company's best-known transactions and the most controversial. The deal made waves at the moment for the price tag it carried, which many believed to be significantly over-inflated, and later on for all of the copyright infringement troubles it carried. To this day, three years on, the site is yet to become profitable despite Google's best efforts feeding the naysayers. But now some interesting information has surfaced revealing that not only it knew that YouTube was overpriced but it gladly paid a – by its own estimates – $1 billion premium over the site's value a... [read more >>] Along with the unveiling of the new Flash Player 10.1, which will be coming out early next year, Google has announced it will be joining Adobe's Open Screen Project, which aims to bring a unified web experience to all of the different types of Internet-enabled devices. Flash Player 10.1 will be the first release to bring full support for the Flash technology to mobile devices across several platforms including Google's Android. “We're excited to be joining Adobe's Open Screen Project, an initiative established a year and a half ago to help developers more easily design content for the web across multiple screens ... [read more >>] Google is ready to expand its testing of the upcoming communications platform Google Wave to include 100,000 lucky new users. The move was first revealed a couple of months ago and now Wave's creators have more details on the wider release and on the product itself. There are several ways of getting your hands on the new product but at this point there's not much you can do to increase your chances. There are four groups that will get access in this 'wave' of invitations and some users will be favored over others. First in line to get new accounts are all of the developers who already have access to the Google Wave san... [read more >>] The controversial Google Books settlement is officially dead, at least in its current form. Heavily criticized by a number of organizations and competing companies, the deal that would have given Google carte blanche to scan and sell out-of-print books without the explicit consent of their authors has now been delayed indefinitely. The agreement was supposed to come under review on October 7 but the plaintiffs, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, filed a motion to delay the hearing. Google didn't object to the motion leading Judge Denny Chin to approve it. A large number of parties have voiced their concerns... [read more >>] No web service is perfect or safe from problems, despite the best teams and the best efforts. Still, some services are more important than others and, depending on their size and how crucial they are to their users, issues affecting them can generate a lot more unwanted attention than others. Such is the case with Gmail which, after a series of highly publicized problems lately, is having problems again leading to a lot of unhappy users. Some users have reported that they can't access their contacts inside the web mail service while others claim they can't access the service at all. At several times it seemed that the usual work... [read more >>] Web ad marketing has managed to propel Google from the ranks of a simple search engine to the world's most powerful company (yeah, you heard me right). Announcing the release of its new program, DoubleClick Ad Exchange, Google transformed itself into a giant real-time ad bidding machine. Neal Mohan, vice president for product management at Google, revealed in a blog post DoubleClicks's Ad Exchange main goals: “Simplify the system for buying and selling display ads […] Deliver better performance that advertisers and agencies can measure […] Open up the ecosystem.” Combining DoubleClick's already in... [read more >>] |