./emilychang eBot

Planning on moving your site to a new domain? Lots of webmasters find this a scary process. How do you do it without hurting your site’s performance in Google search results?

The public web is made up of linked pages that represent both documents and people. Google Search helps make this information more accessible and useful. If you take away the documents, you’re left with the connections between people. Information about the public connections between people is really useful—as a user, you might want to see who else you’re connected to, and as a developer of social applications, you can provide better features for your users if you know who their public friends are. There hasn\’t been a good way to access this information. The Social Graph API now makes information about the public connections between people on the Web, expressed by XFN and FOAF markup and other publicly declared connections, easily available and useful for developers.

The Google Phone - which, according to several reports, will be made by Google partners and will be available by the middle of 2008 - is likely to provide a stark contrast to the approaches of both Apple and Microsoft to the growing market for smartphones. Google, according to several people with direct knowledge of its efforts, will give away its software to hand-set makers and then use the Google Phone’s openness as an invitation for software developers and content distributors to design applications for it.

Doc Searls posted his thoughts questioning the role of advertising in the 21st century Web. He asks, “Why do we continue to take advertising for granted as the primary source of the the Bux DeLuxe required to fund technical, social and personal progress?”

Here’s how Doc thinks about nirvana scenarios:
1. No damn advertising at all. I don’t care how warm and fuzzy Google is, I don’t want to be tracked like an animal and “targeted” with anything, least of all guesswork about what I want, no matter how educated that guesswork is.
2. Tools on my phone that let me tell sellers what I want, and on my terms – and not just on theirs. Whether that’s a latte two exits up the highway, next restaurant that serves seared ahi, or where I can buy an original metal slinky.
3. I want to be able to notify the market of my shopping or buying intentions without revealing who I am, unless it’s on mutually agreed-upon terms.

Search site Google has called on governments and business to agree a basic set of global privacy rules. Without global standards the health of the internet was at risk, the firm\’s privacy chief Peter Fleischer told a UN agency conference in Strasbourg.

"I’d love to see Google and Yahoo and others lead here. I do think they have a responsibility. But not because they are responsible for “killing newspapers”. Rather, because they are responsible for leading, period, in a world where they are the premiere corporations of the information age, an age that requires analysis, transparency, and, well, simply good journalism, unfettered by traditionalist packaging presumptions.”

"Google is the most powerful brand in the world with a brand value in excess of US$66 billion according to a new report. The search engine was valued at US$66.4 billion ahead of General Electric at US$61.8 billion, Microsoft at US$54.9 billion and Coca Cola in fourth at US$44.1. China Mobile rounded out the top five with a brand value of US$41.2 billion.”

"Here, originally uploaded by Steve Jurvetson, is the Google Master Plan I mentioned in the lead of this week’s Future Boy Column...”

For April 12th, 2007, Internet search engine giant Google has honored Yuri Gagarin’s historic first flight into space by changing their logo to show his space capsule orbiting Earth while two small aliens wave him on. (via Yuri’s Night 07 | News)