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Searchviews: Week in Review
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | January 11, 2008 | Share This
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This week, we’re launching Searchviews: Week in Review, a digest of sorts in which we’ll highlight the past week’s Searchviews posts, along with noting other top stories in search, social media, and Internet news. Look for it every Friday. Happy weekend-reading:
- This week’s theme was “open,” and it’s shaping up to be the theme of the year. First, Sony BMG let go of DRM, but they came up with a dumb scheme to sell redeemable giftcards. (Thankfully, they got smart and struck a deal with Amazon yesterday).
- In other “open” news, Google and Facebook joined the Data Portability Workgroup, which wants to let Internet users take their social data from site to site. Not to be outdone, LinkedIn, SixApart, and Flickr jumped on board, as well. Many of these sites don’t actually want users to be able to do this because it hurts their pageviews, so we’ll see what happens.
- And final point in “open”: Bebo now invites everyone to design applications for its network.
- Wikia Search finally launched, but to some pretty harsh criticism. Lesson to entrepreneurs: less hype, more private alpha. Incidentally, another “human-powered” search engine, Mahalo, is growing like gangbusters despite initial blogosphere scoffing.
- Ask.com lost a CEO, but kept it in the family with their replacement. Barry Diller really wants you to try his search engine, people, and 2008 is the year he wants to see you migrate over en masse.
- Microsoft kicked off what’s sure to be a year of many M&As with its acquisition of Norwegian enterprise search company FAST.
- Surely our favorite story this week, though we didn’t spill any digital ink on it ourselves, is the Facebook hoax pulled by one young Frenchman, Arash Derambarsh, who got himself “elected” Facebook president via an app… and managed to convince the entire French press that it actually means something. Apparently lack of understanding of social networking is even more pronounced in the European mainstream media (as in, they don’t get it at all) than it is stateside (where journalists and bloggers represent the bulk of users over 30).
- And finally, a bunch of stats released this week affirmed something we’ve been feeling in our gut for a while: online video will overtake television, probably. I mean, would you rather watch those annoying judges from Dancing with the Stars on their own spin-off, dance-off show that is already painfully hyped and will probably make you want to pluck your eyes out… or would you watch this compact but totally genius interpretation of our American past, Drunk History? Not that we’re biased or anything, but we’ll say more about this particular topic soon.
Topics: Advertising: Online, Ask.com, Google, International, Investment, M&A, Microsoft, Online Video, Search: Innovations, Search: News, Social Media, Tagging |
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