One story that’s capturing a lot of attention today is Facebook surpassing Google in time spent on site in the U.S. Silicon Alley Insider has a chart illustrating as much.
While this is certainly good news for Facebook, it doesn’t necessarily mean bad things for Google. These two are increasingly becoming bigger competitors, but Google, at least the search engine part, doesn’t always aim to keep users on its site. Sure, it does to some extent with things like Google Places and hosted AP articles, but the release of Google Instant this week clearly shows that Google wants to get users what they’re searching for faster.
That’s not to say that Google doesn’t want users sticking around. I think we’ll see more direct answers coming from Google itself in its search results. Google Squared is a big part of this.
Speaking of Google Instant, Danny Sullivan has an interesting article about the company disguising relevancy issues with the feature. Also, I have another article up about Google Instant’s effect on web history, and how it might work from the browser search box and Chrome address bar.
Janko Roettgers at NewTeeVee points out that early demos of Google TV appear to display a Google Instant-like functionality. We should see it soon enough, as Google TV devices should be shipping this month.
USA Today has an interesting interview with a Bing exec who talks about how a feature similar to Google Instant was built for Bing last year.
ProgammableWeb reports that USA Today is opening up its data to developers via an API. According to Romin Irani, the newspaper hopes to raise internal awareness about its databases first, with public access and a developer contest to follow.
Ask announced that Bloglines will be shut down October 1. " Not an easy decision, especially considering our loyal and supportive (not to mention patient) user base, but, ultimately, the right one given business reasons simply too hard to ignore," the company says.
Caitlin Fitzsimmons reports that Facebook has filed for a patent on social CAPTCHAs. The title is "USING SOCIAL INFORMATION FOR AUTHENTICATING A USER SESSION". The abstact says, "A social CAPTCHA is presented to authenticate a member of the social network. The social CAPTCHA includes one or more challenge questions based on information available in the social network, such as the user’s activities and/or connections in the social network. The social information selected for the social CAPTCHA may be determined based on affinity scores associated with the member’s connections, so that the challenge question relates to information that the user is more likely to be familiar with. A degree of difficulty of challenge questions may be determined and used for selecting the CAPTCHA based on a degree of suspicion."
We knew Windows Phone 7 would be here this year, but there is now a launch date, according to Pocket-lint, citing multiple sources familiar with the matter. That date would be October 11.
Reuters is reporting that a judge has reinstated eBay’s 28.4% stake in Craigslist, but Craigslist still gets to keep eBay off its board.
An interesting piece from Jonny Evans at ComputerWorld discusses how big Apple’s AirPlay is going to be for the company. This is one of Apple’s recent announcements that may have been overshadowed by some of the others, but has pretty big implications.
Jenna Wortham at the New York Times’ Bits blog talks about a new social news service from Betaworks and the NYT. It will be called News.me and will be personalized.
TechRadar reports that Google says Android isn’t optimized for tablets, but the Gingerbread and Honeycomb versions (the next two) likely will be.
Michael Arrington says some ex-MySpace execs are working on a new startup called Namesake, which is in private beta. The exact nature of it is still unknown.