SpeedPlexer Blog

If you’ve heard about Bing but haven’t visited yet, let us introduce you.  Bing is a new search engine from Microsoft that finds and organizes search results in an attempt to make it easier for the user to make decisions on where to visit online. Calling themselves a “decision engine”, Bing takes over from Microsoft’s previous search engines: Live Search, Windows Live Search, and MSN Search.

It is visually enticing, with a new homepage image every day that contains special hidden hotspots that lead you to more information about the image. The images are chosen to be artful, not newsy and to strive for subtlety and poetry without hindering searches.  And last week, the NY Times Bits Blog  told us that Bing unveiled fresh updates to its search abilities.

These updates include:
• accurate weather updates when you search by city, which is tracked for accuracy
• “entity cards” - information boxes that appear at the top of search results, containing relevant information on topics like cities, musical artists and medical conditions
• blending of its search, map and photo technology.
• plans to roll out deeper links to Facebook and Twitter

Earlier this year, Wired.com  had already given Bing a positive review on several points, such as finding a good restaurant, shopping or travel information.

“With Bing, Microsoft has shown that it understands that different kinds of searches require different kinds of answers and interfaces. They’ve shown too they understand that a search is often only the beginning of a decision such as what Indian restaurant to try or what kind type and model of water filter is best.”

So even if you have checked it out before, you might want to take a new look to see if these improvements are helpful in your quest for information delivered with internet speed.

Yahoo! announced this morning that it is adding Facebook Connect across many of its properties. This afternoon Google Friend Connect announced the inclusion of Twitter as a top-level log-in option. These moves will be convenient for users, but may not be good for the future of the web, according to Read Write Web.

They say it’s a matter of identity.  “Identity is a very important matter online, particularly as everything becomes more social. Online identity is your address book, it’s your wallet, it’s your reputation and it could become a lot more. Increasingly, you take that Identity from site to site, leveraging on the next site what you did on the last one. If a particular company provides that Identity for you, it sets the rules, regulations, “interest rates” (eg. use of your info for advertising) and determines things like what parts of your identity you can use on different sites and what parts you can’t.

“Facebook and Twitter are becoming big Identity providers. Google and Yahoo! have wanted to be leading Identity providers themselves but today cried Uncle with a big nod to the supremacy of the two leading social networks. At this point they have an interest in doing so, because they want you to share what you do on Yahoo and Google sites with your big link-clicking network of friends on Facebook and Twitter. Google didn’t add Facebook Connect, just Twitter, because Facebook is now Google’s leading challenger.”

While it makes it convenient for the users, RWW feels that, “The short-term trade of giving more control to two big social networks, in exchange for traffic and ad money, may not serve anyone well in the long run.”

And once again, the world changes with internet speed.

“Though shoppers are still cautious about spending this holiday season, they seem to be increasing the dollars they spend online while decreasing the amount they spend at stores.” This was the report from The New York Times Bits Blog as of yesterday.

The report went on to say, “On Black Friday, the big day for offline shopping, more shoppers went to stores but they spent about the same amount as last year. Final sales numbers for Cyber Monday, the popular online shopping day, will come in over the next couple of days, but they appear to be up from last year.”

The LA Times Tech Blog says “It seems buyers were more efficient this year, spending 10% less time browsing than last year, with the average shopping session lasting 7.5 minutes, down 51 seconds from 2008. Peak browsing time: between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. PST, just as West Coasters were sliding into work and East Coasters were starting their lunch breaks.”

GSI Commerce, which provides e-commerce technology to hundreds of Internet retailers, including Toys “R” Us and Ralph Lauren, reported that shoppers spent 50 percent more on Cyber Monday than they did last year, and 26 percent more over the long holiday weekend.

Online shopping is still just a fraction of total retail, but it’s expected to increase 5.4 percent while offline spending is expected to decline 1 percent. Sixty-nine percent of adult Internet users plan to make a holiday purchase online this year, compared to 55 percent last year and 49 percent in 2007, according to Shop.org.

The reasons: shopping online is more convenient than driving to a busy mall, it’s easier to compare prices with internet speed and most sites are offering holiday discounts and some form of free shipping.

Read Write Web reports, that “web searches and traffic for online retailers during the holidays were significantly down as compared to previous years, according to research from Experian Hitwise.

“However, this Black Friday showed a 4 percent increase in site visits versus Thanksgiving Day traffic - a stat that usually falls between those two days.”

They go on to say what we’ve already told you in our headline, that “the retail site that got the lion’s share of traffic this year was Amazon.com, which netted 13.55 percent of the traffic seen by the top 500 retail websites.”

“Interestingly,” they tell us, “Apple’s website saw the largest increase - by a huge margin - between Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday. Overnight, their traffic skyrocketed 110 percent. Traditionally, Apple’s online deals for this red-letter day in commerce were modest at best. However, this year, rumors of substantial discounts were leaked online and spread like wildfire.” Perhaps the lesson here is: “If you want to see a ridiculous upswing in traffic on a major American retail date, maintain relative stinginess and secrecy, then “leak” good tidings of great joy just before the big day.”

Other sites reported to have a significant traffic increase in this 48-hour period include Staples with 47 percent, Dell with 40 percent and Amazon with 9 percent.

“What’s more, most sites saw a marginal increase in traffic over last year’s Black Friday traffic - as you’ll recall, the global economy had recently tanked. Do we see this as a sign of tentative optimism about the economy, at least on the part of American consumers?”

Might the economy be picking up with internet speed?

If you love the deals on Black Friday, but hate the idea of fighting throngs of thousands to get them, you’ll be glad to know that many retailers are offering deals from their online stores too!  PR Web says of Black Friday, “Day After Thanksgiving sales are heating up on the internet as shoppers take to the malls and retail stores in search of their Christmas presents and gifts. Most of these companies are offering many online only offers to web shoppers.” They talk about a site called One Million Gifts.com that specializes in offering online shoppers top quality companies through their website. 

The Internet Patrol also recommends we shop with internet speed from the comfort of our homes.  Their Black Friday list includes Walmart, Amazon, and Best Buy.

“The Black Friday Best Buy sale has faithful shoppers, and for good reason. Shoppers are known to line up for blocks to get into the store when it opens - in fact, they open the stores at 5:00 a.m. on Black Friday, and you have to have a ticket to get in and buy some of the items! But you can also get them online - where the Best Buy Black Friday sale also starts at 5:00 a.m..”

They also tell us that Espirit will be taking 25% off all online orders on Black Friday and that Macys is also having an online Black Friday sale.

So if you think you missed out on the deals because you didn’t wake up at 5:00a.m., think again! Check your favorite stores right now from your computer and see what’s still available to you with the year-round magic of internet speed.

Read Write Web reports on the dangers of posting when you think you’re doing so anonymously.  Only last month, courts ordered anonymous commenters to pay big fines to women who they defiled using vulgar, derogatory remarks on an internet forum. And previously, an anonymous blogger in the modeling industry was forced to reveal her identity after numerous malicious posts about a colleague showed up on her blog. Now, a nasty comment cost someone their job—and with internet speed.

In the comments section of an online newspaper article, one user posted a single word response—one that isn’t improper in itself, but in the context of the article, it’s slang usage was offensive. Of course, the site’s moderators quickly deleted the comment but it soon reappeared - obviously this person was intent on having their say.

The site’s director of social media, found that the commenter’s IP address was coming from a local school. Thinking that he’d teach some kid an important lesson in netiquette, he contacted the school, only to find out it was not a kid, but an adult who worked there. When confronted, the employee resigned.

The lesson here? There’s no such thing as true anonymity on the net these days, and thanks to new technologies like Facebook Connect, the days where you can hide behind a made-up web handle may be numbered. In fact, Facebook itself may even owe its success to how it forces users to post with their “real” name and identity notes blogger Kent Newsome. “With a name comes accountability, and there is a direct correlation between accountability and behavior,” he writes.

So, as Read Write Web summed it up in their article’s title, “Leaving a Vulgar Comment Online Might Cost You Your Job”.

We’ve got another great example of how entertainment is changing with internet speed– it’s called The Bob Bendick Podcast. A podcast, as defined by Researchers at the Center for Journalism and Communication Research at the University of Texas at Austin, is a digital audio or video file that is episodic; downloadable; program-driven, mainly with a host and/or theme; and convenient, usually via an automated feed with computer software.

Bob Bendick, in case you don’t already know, is the comic host of a weekly one-hour interview chat show. Recorded in front of a live audience at ACME Comedy Theatre in Hollywood, their focus is mainly comedic actors, but Bob interviews all types of entertainment professionals about their journey to achieving the level of success they’ve enjoyed so far.

It’s interactive too—by keeping up with the show via the website, Facebook or Twitter, you can see which guests are coming up and ask them your own questions. The Q&A portion of the show includes questions from the live audience members as well as listeners from all over the world who can be part of the recording via Skype, Twitter or Email. Once recorded, the show is posted on iTunes for download, and photos are posted to the web.

Right now on iTunes you can download any or all of five past shows with guests like Adam Carolla and Robert Forster. Check the website for info on upcoming guests. 

It’s a great hybrid of live theater, worldwide participation and the convenience of listening whenever the heck you want. It’s also a wonderful resource for comedians around the world to learn how they might build a career upon their comic wit!

This past weekend, a sci-fi, fantasy and horror convention in Arizona called TusCon, featured an interesting event.  According to citizen journalist blogger BJay, they hosted an event for people who modify their computers to make them go really fast for gaming. It was hosted by PCwormhole.com, a site that offers “a gateway to bleeding edge PC’s and the innovators who build and bench them.” They call this over-clocking.

We’re all about clocking speed here at Speedplexer, at least internet speed. But if you’re some who really, really feels the need for speed, you’ll want to speed up your computer’s processing as well.

BJay explains in her article, “Some people overclock their computers or make them run at a higher clock rate or GHz than it was designed to (it goes faster). However their efforts are limited by the temperature of the processor or some other internal components.  Cooler temps allow more speed.  Computers come with a heatsink to keep temperatures down.  However for hardcore, extreme enthusiasts, it’s not enough and they modify it.”

She included photos of a water cooled computer CPU, a CPU cooled by liquid nitrogen, an Nvidia video card with putty applied to reduce the temperature and a CPU cooled by a modified A/C unit and tubing. PCwormhole.com also has photos available, if you’re interested.

“These computers were using i7 processors and got to temperatures as low as -90 degrees and speeds were increased from a clock speed of 2.6 GHz to 5 GHz – making it about twice as fast.”

The argument rages on despite the fact that the winner has been declared–The New Oxford American Dictionary announced its Word of the Year this week and the winner was from the world of technology and new media rather than topics like Economy, Politics and Current Affairs, Environment or Novelty. The tech terms considered were:

• hashtag – a # [hash] sign added to a word or phrase that enables Twitter users to search for tweets (postings on the Twitter site) that contain similarly tagged items and view thematic sets

• intexticated – distracted because texting on a cellphone while driving a vehicle

• netbook – a small, very portable laptop computer with limited memory

• paywall – a way of blocking access to a part of a website which is only available to paying subscribers

• sexting – the sending of sexually explicit texts and pictures by cellphone

But the winner was…UNFRIEND.

unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.
As in, “I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight.”

“It has both currency and potential longevity,” notes Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program. “In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year… “unfriend” is different from the norm. It assumes a verb sense of “friend” that is really not used (at least not since maybe the 17th century!). Unfriend has real lex-appeal.”

But if you read the comments section under the Oxford University Press blog posting, you’ll see plenty of debating, not only about unfriend versus defriend, but also about another controversial term. Check it out and join the discussion to help change the English language with internet speed!

L.A. Times reports that Google is facing court action in Switzerland because it isn’t meeting the country’s demands for tighter privacy protection with its Google Maps’ Street View service, according to a Swiss government official.

Street View is a feature that lets users pick a point on a map and see a panoramic street-level image of the surroundings. By adjusting the location of the point, a user can take a virtual walk down the street. Google constructs the images from panoramic photos taken by cars it has equipped with cameras…and that travel with internet speed, apparently.

Faces had not been sufficiently blurred, and people were concerned about being shown near “sensitive locations, for example outside hospitals, prisons or schools,” Swiss government official Hanspeter Thuer said.

Google argues that it provides measures to protect privacy by making it possible for people to contact Google and ask to have pictures of their property removed from Street View. The company also said it spoke with privacy regulators and gave them an opportunity to raise questions.

“We’re proud of the blurring technology we’ve developed for Street View, and are confident the product is completely legal, but we wanted to go the extra mile to address Herr Thuer’s concerns,” the company said in a blog post.

Google ran into a similar problem in the U.S. this year when a Pennsylvania couple took the company to court, saying the feature was an invasion of privacy. A judge threw out the case, saying “complete privacy does not exist” and arguing that photos and building plans of people’s home were already available to the public.

In the blog post, Google indicated it planned to fight the Swiss case as well: “We will vigorously defend Street View in court and we’re committed to continue bringing the benefits to Swiss users.”