Finally Twitter has released integrated Twitter Search. A requested feature since the acquisition of Summize. It is very simple and is directly integrated into your Twitter stream as shown below.

The only issue I have with the update is with trending topics. Just seems to be randomly placed if you ask me. Otherwise nifty feature and I definitely love the integrated search in the Twitter stream. Anyone suppose this could be oddly related to Friendfeeds real time make over?

This is big, big news for a culture where more and more entertainment comes from on demand services. Hulu announced today that it will be partnering with Disney to provide their content on the popular Hulu.com streaming service. The most notable aspect of this deal is that it will allow users to watch ABC content via Hulu, which is a pretty major about face for Disney. Previously, ABC has refused to allow its content to be streamed from anywhere other than its own site, where users can watch ABC shows such as Lost and Castle (the latter of which is a current TG office favorite).

AppleInsider is reporting that Apple is going to be releasing some cheaper Macs, maybe. How many people think that this really matters? Here is the only question you need to answer: will Apple release a full computer (screen, keyboard, etc) for an equivalent price to that of a PC? The answer is no, and this is why [from DailyTech]:

“Macs have gone from an average price of $1,432 and $1,574, for desktops and laptops respectively in June ‘06 to $1,543 and $1,515 respectively in June ‘08.  While much lower to start, PCs are now even lower in average sale price. The average PC notebook went from $877 to $700.”

How sad it is to see the end of the First Great Boom, this time in the form of a general collapse of AOL. With its most recent earnings coming in (year over year), down a stunning 23%, it is headed out the door. What public company would want such a stupendously underperforming asset such as AOL? What company, such as Time Warner, with all of their own headaches, would keep a non-core asset failing so egregiously.

Now, it has become clear that AOL is on the way out of the Time Warner fold. TechCrunch has quotes to make you giggle. We here at the TG office were kicking this over, and we kept returning to the original terms of that AOL Time Warner deal. Go look it up. Now, how pathetic is this?

Over the past few months since Wolfram was announced on Techcrunch, the company that wishes to answer user’s semantic questions has decided to keep themselves as closed as possible, until the past week. Until the release of Google’s Public Data Charts, Wolfram kept pretty quiet. On April 28th, Stephen Wolfram presented Wolfram|Alpha to Harvard Law Schools and broadcasted it online. Conviently, Google released its new addition to search by allowing you to see publicly accessible data inside searches, and then compare that data with other sets of data on a graph.

Before the presentation, Wolfram has kept a mailing list, as is common for most pre-release applications, and didn’t send out almost any email through it. The minute they launched however, this changed. In the past week, I’ve received several emails from Wolfram promoting its launch and the presentation at Harvard. But there is a problem:

I still can’t use it.

Apple is known for their stellar commercials and amazing design when it comes to advertising products. Google has taken their lead and released a really dang good commercial for their browser Chrome. While it probably won’t get commercialized anytime soon it definitely has potential. Check them out below.

What else is Google up to?  See more article about Google on Techgeist.

Open Office, Songbird and Identi.ca. All three of these services/applications have something in common. No, it’s not what each of them do… but rather what they represent. A simple clone.

Open Office – Microsoft Office 2003

Songbird – iTunes

Identica – Twitter

I am all about free alternatives, trust me on this fact… I am a poor teenager scrambling for a quarter. This does not mean I am going to sacrifice innovation for re-creation. There are many open source apps that simply clone the functionalism or simply the look of proprietary applications claiming innovation because they are open source. Wrong, quite the opposite.

Just because you opened up some code doesn’t mean anyone CARES. The consumer is all about flash, dazzle and speed. The newer the better… no matter what the price is. The iPhone/iPod are great examples of this.

The current open source applications that I have mentioned above are mimicking old designs and concepts. Open Office is still working with the same old task bars while Office 2007 has moved to the new and innovative ribbon interface. Songbird is the exact same as iTunes the main difference is leveraging a plug-in platform. Identi.ca is …

I spent yesterday lamenting the rise of theoretical Google and iPhone killers, now it is a reality check. Following the demonstration of the WA yesterday, I was expecting a deluge of negative press. I was expecting a wild ride of people saying that it was in fact, the next Cuil. I was proved wrong. Head over to TechMeme, the press is surprisingly lukewarm. I was wildly excited. In all honesty, after the Cuil fiasco, lukewarm at this stage is incredible.

Now, people are tripping over their heels to claim that this is “no google killer,” fair enough. But, as Twitter gave us “the message service we didn’t know that we needed,” I have a sneaking suspicion that WolframAlpha will give us the answer engine we didn’t know that we needed. Note that this is not a pure search engine. Recall that that was in fact what Cuil claimed to be. This is something different, new, and possibly extraordinary.

So, until they let us into the WolframAlpha Alpha, we will wait. But trust us, the moment we know anything, you will haer it loud and clear. Long live competiton.

Google has just announced that it will be adding public data graphs to search results in order to give users the ability to visualize things like unemployment data. This is a big leap forward for allowing public data to be more accessible to users.

The public data is accessible by searching for a US city, and a term such as ‘unemployment rate’. Instead of having to navigate badly designed government websites, you will be given a chart at the top of the search results with the current unemployment rate of the specified city. You can click through to compare it to other cities, the US as a whole, or other reigons.

As Google adds more products to their main search engine, it steps forward in making it easier to find all types of data. Instead of just links to external websites, Google offers links to user profiles, news, stocks, trends, and other data from its various products.

In response to this release, Wolfram, the search engine that is promising to given users answers to semantic questions, has released screenshots of their interface. You can find them here.

Find more about Google on Techgeist.

Hotmail has been the de facto choice for email accounts since… god knows when. While my first email address wasn’t through Hotmail (it was through go.com YEARS ago) many of my friends had an email address through hotmail to use the infamously infused IM client MSN Messenger. It seems as if the goliath of web based email is severely losing traction and losing it fast. With such a strong brand name how could this of possibly happened?

Identity Crisis

I don’t know a single person outside of the tech world who knows what the hell Windows Live IS, and honestly I had no idea for a while there also. It is basically an umbrella name for multiple products and while this is great in theory (you’re creating constant brand recgonition) the way Microsoft went about this was horrid.

When people signed up for a new account via hotmail.com they thought they were getting a hotmail address, rather they were getting a live address which I have first hand experience confused people beyond belief.  Redirecting people to a Live web address and simply stating they were signing up for a Live email instead of …