Google Maps will soon offer users the ability to explore Australian cities at street level with the introduction of Streetview. Google-branded cars with rooftop cameras are starting to traverse the streets of Australian capital cities taking high quality photos of the streetscape. After privacy concerns where people and car number plates are identifiable in the USA, Google is undertaking to ensure that the sport known as “streetspotting” doesn’t take off here. Read more
Online photo-sharing community Flickr has rolled out two mapping features allowing users to find photos based on geo-graphic places in a bid to give the site local appeal.
Flickr Places lets users pinpoint local ‘hot spots’ of Flickr contributions, and to search by more than 100,000 place names, such as cities, countries and regions. A location’s ‘Places’ page will contain a collection of photos and local information including maps, weather and current times. Flickr claimed that 3,000 to 5,000 new Places will be added each week, collating regional information including local weather and maps.
Flickr has also launched a world map, which will allow users to hover over locations across the globe and view tags. By clicking on the tag, it will enable users to view a collection of current photos from the place.
Kakul Srivastava, senior director of product management at Flickr, said, “As the ‘eyes of the world,’ Flickr takes us beyond images of famous landmarks to a more local perspective of the people and the events taking place around the globe.”
I think it will be really interesting to see the cultural differences when searching for photo’s based on the tags and a great experience of exploring the world through a unique, personal vision of Flickr photographers, especially when planning your next trip!
2007 has been a big year, one dominated by growth in online video, the explosion of social media and the acquisition and consolidation of many major media, agency and measurement businesses.
So, what will be the major changes influencing digital marketing opportunities in the Australian marketplace in 2008? Here’s a few thought starters…
INCREASING CONTROL
Consumer control over media content will step up a notch, as uptake for products like Foxtel iQ, Tivo and web widgets like iGoogle make it easier for people to access the content they want and avoid advertising messages. Online video services will blossom in content breadth and viewer numbers, offering more opportunities to re-cut and re-use that TV spot, and for some audiennces will become an effective alternative to broadcast TV. Read more
MSN has just held “searchification” to showcase their new suite of features being rolled out in their Fall update.
There is plenty of new stuff to write about – read all the details in a live blog.
Here are the standout points
1) Query intent: by playing with stop words, stemming, term equivalence and punctuation analysis, they have vastly improved relevance. Ie, it now knows that a search for “the office” should be related to the TV show, not the Microsoft product.
2) Structured Information Extraction: aka grouping and verticals.
3) Rich Answers: MSN’s answer to Universal Search. The coolest thing here is the video search. Not only does it find video content on any site (ie not just YouTube/MetaCafe), it allows a user preview the video inline (ie on the search results page), going as far as taking you to the most relevant bit of the video based on your query.
4) Webmaster tools: another me-too to catch up with Google’s Webmaster Central.
So, it looks like MSN is catching up with (and exceeding in some areas) Google in terms of features. But, with Google so ingrained with users, even if MSN delivers better results, who would ever realise?
Try out the new search:
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=brad+pitt&go=&form=press – this search includes “rich answers” and a celeb ranking tool (supremely useful in everyday life, I’m sure).
Make sure you change the final variable to &FORM=PRESS if it doesn’t get carried through to subsequent searches (the new search features are still in beta).
What do you get when you mix a search engine and one of the world’s leading digital advertising platforms with mobile social networking and rumours of a new mobile phone network, or phone, or software for a phone (aka the “gPhoneâ€)? Who knows? Watch this space.
So, what’s this all about? Google has entered into an agreement to acquire, or acquire parts of, Zingku a mobile social networking service. Zingku’s services include:
- a way to store and fetch photos taken from your mobile phone, and then share with friends via SMS, IM and plain ol’ web.
- invite friends to a gig, party, library session etc via SMS, IM and email.
- instant polls: “What movie shall we see? 1) Superbad 2) Underdog?
- fetch postings from any blog or RSS to a mobile phone via SMS.
There are already obvious crossovers with a number of existing Google properties: Orkut, Picasa, Blogger, Mobile Search… It will be interesting to see how this develops.
One of the key features that attracted many of the millions who recently flocked to online social networking site Facebook was privacy. People were often free and easy with their personal information, comforted in the knowledge that they had a reasonable level of control over that information and who could see it.
However, Facebook sees a great opportunity for growth by allowing user profiles to be indexed and searchable in Google, Yahoo etc.
“We wanted to give people who had never come to Facebook, or who are not currently registered, the opportunity to discover their friends who are on Facebook.â€
The information on the profiles will be less than what a user logged in to Facebook would see, and users also have an opportunity to opt-out.
There are a few key points to this story
Users: As a user of these sites, never put up any information about yourself, your interests or your weekend shenanigans that you wouldn’t want to be seen by a prospective employer, your colleagues, a potential lover or your mother.
Most Facebook users are unphased by this new feature – it’s a great way to get and stay connected with friends.
Advertisers: Expect further growth in page impressions and user numbers
Search: Due to the high inbound link popularity of these sites, expect Facebook to dominate the top rankings for vanity searches. Even though the profiles will be pretty light on content, it will be a dedicated page to a single topic – a name – and as such will be highly relevant for a search for that name. Apply these same principles to optimising your own executive profiles – 1 page per person, rather than jamming a page with 5-10 people’s details.
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