Google Buzz Not a Twitter or Facebook Killer, Says Google Exec

Google Buzz is not a rival to Facebook or Twitter, says Google exec Bradley Horowitz — instead he sees it as a platform for conversation, and hopes other services will be able to flow in and out of Buzz.

In an eWeek interview earlier this week, Horowitz, Google’s VP of product management, was asked whether Buzz was intended as a challenger to Twitter and Facebook. He replied:

“Absolutely not. Per what I just said, this is creating a new category of communication. It’s filling a niche, which is not currently met in the market. I think something unique is happening on Buzz that will continue to evolve. It’s hard to create a trend line or extrapolate too much from six days of use, but certainly conversation and the conversational Web is a place where Buzz has excelled. I think it is unique and offers a compelling interesting experience.”

 

Conversation Is Key

Horowitz also explained that Buzz goes beyond updating your status (like Twitter) or checking in (like Foursquare) — it’s about engagement:

“It’s not just status-casting. It’s not just checking in. It’s really meaningful interactions around meaningful topics within Buzz and it’s reaching the right audience and people are engaged. That kind of value proposition is I think unique to Buzz. I’ve heard that again and again. In the realm of positive feedback, I think that people are finding that the conversational mode of buzz is very, very powerful and the quality of audience is also great.”

 

Buzz: An Open System

Google’s plan, it seems, is to create an open platform for social messaging, such that Google Buzz is integrated with services all around the web. Horowitz aims to create the “most open, well integrated, well behaving social network in the industry.”

This technical openness could create the kind of developer stampede that made Google Maps, Twitter and Flickr take off. The only unknown is whether technical openness could be in opposition to the private nature of our e-mail inboxes.

 

 

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Facebook Analyzes How Relationship Status Impacts Happiness [STATS]

Valentine’s Day, and it apparently had the data team at Facebook thinking: Does being in a relationship (as defined by Facebook relationship status) really make individuals more happy? The results, which are detailed on Facebook’s blog aren’t quite as black and white as you might expect.

Methodology

Facebook already has a methodology for measuring the overall “happiness” of its users. It basically looks at how many positive words people use in their status updates (for English speaking users). This results in the USA Gross National Happiness Index.

For this particular study, Facebook looked at the use of positive and negative words in status messages over the course of one week in January. The data team was then able to filter the results based on sex and relationship status (as defined by Facebook).

The Results

The results aren’t entirely unsurprising: People who are in relationships do seem happier than those who are not in relationships. However, there are some important areas of distinction. For instance, the people that seem the most unhappy are those that either don’t disclose their relationship status or those that are in an open relationship.

An open relationship dwarfs widowers and “it’s complicated” by a pretty significant margin for both men and women. However, those that don’t disclose their relationship at all are about 50% more negative than everyone else.

In the end, while this data is certainly interesting, it’s only scientific insofar as it is a reflection of what people choose to share in their status updates. Obviously, that’s not going to be a strong — or even defining — indicator of how people really feel, regardless of relationship status.

What do you think of this data? Do you find yourself more or less happy when in a relationship as opposed to being single? Let us know!

 

 

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United States Internet Speed is on the Decline.

According to Akamai’s Q3 State of the Internet report, the United States’ internet speed did not qualify for a place in the top ten list of countries with the fastest internet in the world, and its average overall speed has actually decreased by 2.4% year-over-year from 2008 to 2009.

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The United States actually ranked 18th out of 203 nations tested in terms of average connection speeds, falling behind speed leaders like South Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong.

When looked at from a global perspective, the results are quite positive. The report states:

“The global average connection speed is once again increasing, after an unusual drop in the second quarter. The average connection speed of 1.7 Mbps returns it to a level consistent with the first quarter of 2009. South Korea maintained its position as the country with the highest average connection speed, and was joined by Ireland as one of two countries in the top 10 posting quarterly gains of greater than 25% (on top of minor quarterly gains also seen in the second quarter). Romania, Sweden, and the Czech Republic all saw quarterly declines in their average connection speeds, though they all maintained positive yearly growth. While the United States saw a small quarterly gain in average connection speeds, increasing to 3.9 Mbps, from a year-over-year perspective, the trend is negative, though just slightly so.”

If you live in Delaware, Massachusetts, the District of Columbia, or Utah you can be quite pleased with your region’s Q3 performance as they each increased upwards of 15% in average connection speed from Q2 measurements.

In case you’re unfamiliar with Akamai, the company serves as a distributed computing platform for companies worldwide. Their quarterly State of the Internet report analyzes data gathered from their global server network and covers security, internet penetration, mobile internet, average connection speeds and broadband connectivity.

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The FBI Sucks at Photoshop [PIC]

The FBI this week released a “digitally-altered” image showing what Osama Bin Laden possibly looks like now he’s older.

While the FBI claims to have used “cutting edge” technology to create the image, a Spanish politician has noticed that the poster is a modified version of his campaign photo — he now finds his face in America’s most wanted list.

While on the surface it’s an amusing misstep by intelligence agencies, Gaspar Llamazares, the former leader of Spain’s United Left coalition, calls the move “shameless”. His safety is at risk, he told the BBC, and he no longer feels able to travel to America now his likeness is on a wanted poster: “Bin Laden’s safety is not threatened by this but mine certainly is”, Llamazares said.

Left, Bin Laden in 1998; middle, the FBI image; right, Gaspar Llamazares

The FBI is quoted admitting to the error, saying that the artist found the photo on the web and didn’t know it was of a Spanish politician:

When producing age-progressed photographs, forensic artists typically select features from a database of stock reference photographs to create the new image…it appears that in this instance the forensic artist was unable to find suitable features among the reference photographs and obtained those features, in part, from a photograph he found on the internet.
The forensic artist was not aware of the identity of the individual depicted in the photograph. The similarities between the photos were unintentional and inadvertent.

We don’t think it matters that the man in question was a notable politician: using photos from an image search to create a most wanted poster is surely putting the subject at risk, is it not?

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A New iPhone Worm is Here, And This Time it’s Malicious [WARNING]

A couple of weeks ago, the first iPhone worm appeared, spreading on jailbroken devices with the SSH application installed (vulnerability being the fact that many users haven’t changed the default root password). As far as worms go, this one was quite benign, merely “rickrolling” users; i.e., changing the background image on the device to an image of Rick Astley.

Now, according to early reports of strange activity by Dutch ISP XS4ALL, and later confirmed by Sophos, there’s a new worm in the wild, and this one is far more malicious.

The new worm is called “Duh” or “Ikee.B”, and it uses the exact same vulnerability as the first one. The fix is thus identical – change the root password in the SSH application to something other than the default, which is “alpine”.

Failing to do so might result in very serious consequences. According to Sophos, Ikee.B is “designed to connect to a server in Lithuania and to follow orders from remote hackers.” It can find vulnerable iPhones on a wide range of IP addresses, including IPs in several different countries, for example the Netherlands, Portugal, Australia, Austria, and Hungary. Furthermore, it changes the root password on the iPhone to “ohshit” (as discovered by Paul Ducklin, head of technology in Sophos Asia Pacific.)

Users who haven’t jailbroken their iPhone or haven’t installed the SSH application are not affected by this vulnerability.

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Microsoft and News Corp in Discussions to Remove Newspaper Content from Google

Yes, really. Rupert Murdoch’s crusade to blame Google for the failing newspaper business model continues today, as it emerges that News Corp has conducted talks with Microsoft about de-indexing the company’s sites from Google and (presumably) being paid to include them in Bing instead. The concept makes sense only if you buy Murdoch’s claims that Google “stealing” content rather than simply helping people find it.

The revelation comes from the Financial Times, which has a strong track record for accurate reportage – this is unlikely to be a fluffy rumor. The piece reads, in part:

Microsoft has had discussions with News Corp over a plan that would involve the media company’s being paid to “de-index” its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry.

The impetus for the discussions came from News Corp, owner of newspapers ranging from the Wall Street Journal of the US to The Sun of the UK, said a person familiar with the situation, who warned that talks were at an early stage.

However, the Financial Times has learnt that Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers to persuade them to remove their sites from Google’s search engine.
News Corp and Microsoft, which owns the rival Bing search engine, declined to comment.

I say go for it. So, I’m sure, do all the other web publishers who see that removing many of the major news sites from Google will provide even more traffic for the upstarts. News Corp is merrily making itself irrelevant to web consumers, while continuing to use Google as its punch bag rather than addressing the radical transition of media into the online world.

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